Gaming laptops are always a balance between price, performance, and portability. The Asus ROG Strix G16 manages to find a good balance between all three. Though a few more design updates would be welcome, its RTX 50-series graphics and Ryzen 9 9955HX3D processor form a potent combination that delivers good gaming performance for the money.
If I asked you to picture a "gaming laptop", there’s a good chance something like the Asus ROG Strix G16 would come to mind. A lot of its design plays into the stereotypes but falls into the middle with how far it takes them. It isn’t thin or light, measuring 13.94 x 10.39 x 1.2 inches and weighing 5.51 pounds. It has a bright RGB keyboard and front LED strip to paint your desk in colored light. And the style is aggressive with a big ROG eye on the lid and plenty of hard angles and "Republic of Gamers" debossed on the hinge.
The system is beautiful, if a bit too similar to last year’s version. Big design changes are hardly a requirement for a great gaming laptop, but the Intel version of the 2025 Strix G16 has some meaningful upgrades that could influence which may be the best fit. While certainly not shabby, this version offers an improved selection of ports (Thunderbolt 5 and an extra USB Type-A), upgraded WiFi 7 compatibility, wraparound RGB lighting, and includes a larger trackpad.
The AMD system I’m reviewing comes with two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, two Type-C USB 4 ports, a full-size HDMI 2.1 video out, an RJ45 ethernet jack, and a 3.5mm audio combo port. Only one of the USB 4 ports can be used for charging, unlike the Intel version, and both Type-A ports are on the right side, which can get in the way of the mouse with trailing wires or larger dongles.
The AMD version is no slouch, either. Outfitted with a Ryzen 9 9955HX3D processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, it has both the brains and brawn to run the latest AAA games at a high framerate. It comes with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2TB NVMe SSD for fast load times and speedy multitasking. Both the memory and storage can be upgraded and can be accessed easily by unscrewing and removing the back panel.
The "X3D" in the processor is important and points towards the potential better gaming performance thanks to its 3D V-Cache design. Broadly speaking, you can think of a processor’s cache as its own personal RAM supply, keeping the most important information data available for rapid access. Usually, these memory dies are laid out on a flat plane, but the G16’s Ryzen 9 9955HX3D stacks them vertically, lowering latency for improved performance. Compared to the standard Ryzen 9 9955HX, the 9955X3D also doubles the total amount of L3 cache bringing the total to 128MB. In short, this variant can access more, and more quickly, which directly translates to better gaming performance.
Keeping that hardware cool is one of the most important factors in performance. Unlike the Intel model, which received a new vapor chamber cooler this generation, the AMD version features the same three-fan, heat pipe design as last year. It also uses liquid metal on the graphics card to help keep temperatures low. Air is drawn in through vents on the bottom and through the keyboard and exhausts out the back and sides. When the fans ramp up to full speed, you can definitely feel the heat on your mouse hand, but I didn’t find it uncomfortable.
While it would have been nice to see the same upgrades Team Blue received, the existing system works well enough to avoid thermal throttling. After multiple benchmarks, I recorded a peak CPU temperature of 85C and a peak GPU temperature of 87C in turbo mode. Though the system is capable of running silently at idle, it definitely gets loud enough while gaming that it may bother anyone sitting nearby.
There’s no OLED screen on the G16, which comes as a bit of a surprise given that many of its competitors do (see the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 and Razer Blade 16). There’s no mini-LED either, so HDR isn’t an option. It still gets plenty bright at around 500-nits and offers vibrant and relatively accurate color reproduction, so everything from games to editing YouTube videos looks reliably good. If you don’t care about gaming in HDR or want to avoid burn-in risk, it’s a solid option and helps the price stay reasonable.
Instead of OLED, the display offers a 1600p resolution and a fast 240Hz refresh rate. This resolution offers a middle ground between clarity and performance. At 16 inches, this translates to 189 pixels per inch (PPI), which appears crisp and detailed in both still images and games. It also doesn’t require an RTX 5090 or low settings to hit 60 FPS or higher in most games. It won’t compete with OLED in responsiveness, but its 240Hz refresh rate is certainly up to the task for competitive play and reduces motion blur and input lag that might give an enemy the advantage.
The keyboard and trackpad are just fine. The keys have good tactility and aren’t mushy, but lack the crispness of competitors like the HP Omen Max 16 or even Asus’s own ROG Zephyrus G16. They do offer programmable lighting and customizable macro buttons along the top row, though.
The trackpad is on the smaller side at 3.4 x 5.1 inches but is still large enough to easily use and allowed me to avoid activating it with my palms. The trackpad also features a built-in number pad option that can be activated by clicking the upper right corner. When pressed, a number pad is illuminated, allowing you to press numbers instead of moving the cursor. This can be convenient but more than once I activated it by accident and had to press multiple times to get it to turn off.
The speakers get relatively loud and avoid distortion at all but the highest level. They also offer a surprising amount of bass, so games and movies sound fuller and more rich than laptops typically are. A gaming headset will still offer a superior experience, especially if you’re trying to hear enemy footsteps, but you could definitely use the built-in speakers and have a good time outside of competitive games.
The system comes with a 1080p webcam, but it’s nothing special and doesn’t support Windows Hello facial recognition. While it’s not a make or break feature, it’s a nice convenience and disappointing to see left out here.
Finally, we come to battery life. The G16 comes with a 90 WHr battery capacity, so you won’t run into any issues taking it on a plane. To test its uptime, I put it through Procyon’s battery life test, which simulates mixed-use for productivity. In this test, it lasts five hours and 12 minutes. Gaming on battery is expectedly far lower, averaging around an hour and ten minutes. The system comes with a 220W power brick, which adds another pound or so to the system’s total weight, but if you’re planning on gaming, you’ll definitely want to carry it with you.
You can also charge the system through one of its USB-C ports at up to 100-watts. I found this to be very inconsistent, however. Even with the RTX 5070 Ti completely disabled, the system set to Silent and Eco GPU mode in Armoury Crate, and Windows set to prioritize battery life, it still wouldn’t charge consistently. After troubleshooting different chargers and cables, it appears that it may be a bug related to battery care settings in the MyAsus application, though I can’t be sure. I am certain that the system shouldn’t have been draining running potato settings with brightness set to minimum, though.
The G16 relies on a combination of Armoury Crate and MyAsus to customize its different settings. MyAsus is an application included on virtually all modern Asus laptops, even outside of gaming, and is designed to be beginner friendly. It gives you a quick overview of the system’s key stats and offers a number of diagnostics to pinpoint the root cause of different problems that may arise. The software also provides a range of options that are largely doubled-up in Armoury Crate, but are simpler toggles for things like Battery Care and Picture Modes.
Armoury Crate is where the bulk of the G16’s settings reside and it only takes a quick glance between the apps to see that it’s significantly more complex and feature rich. Within, you can see the same diagnostics but significantly expanded to include clock speeds and temperatures. The home page offers all of your most common settings, such as your current performance mode (Windows, Silent, Performance, Turbo, and Manual) and several shortcuts like disabling the Windows keep to get gaming faster. Clicking Manual mode allows you to dial in your own overclock, but like most laptops, there really isn’t much headroom outside of the preset modes.
Clicking through the tabs on the left, however, and you’ll find settings for lighting, remapping keys, configuring the GPU performance mode, changing the picture preset, and more. There’s even a wallpaper tool, a game launcher, and as an update tool so you can always be sure you’re running the latest drivers.
There’s a lot here and it’s not the best presented, but it’s also the exact same we’ve seen on ROG laptops for several years. If you’ve used it before, you’ll know what to expect. If not, prepare to take some time to explore each tab in depth.
The Strix G16 has the on-paper specs to offer great gaming performance, but as with any laptop, there’s more at play than simple specs. Temperatures, wattages, clock speeds, and how long it’s able to maintain them all come into play.
To get an idea of what you should actually expect for performance, I ran the system through a battery of synthetic and real-world gaming tests. These tests are run on all of our gaming laptops and each is designed to assess a certain quality, like ray tracing performance with and without DLSS. All tests are performed at Ultra settings unless otherwise noted and are conducted at both native resolution and 1080p or the equivalent for its aspect ratio.
Beginning with synthetics, the G16 performs well, which isn’t surprising given the high its beefy processor. Its RTX 5070 Ti graphics are no slouch either, which is also represented here. Obviously, if you invest in a system with a higher-tier graphics card, you’ll see some gains, but the G16 sits in a sweet spot between price and performance.
Looking at real-world gaming benchmarks, the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D gets to flex its muscle a bit more. While the biggest benefits can be seen at 1200p, the G16 also sees a performance advantage at 1600p. As I’ve tested the system over the last several weeks, I’ve been able to do anecdotal testing with Ready or Not, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Battlefield 6. While I don’t have a standard Ryzen 9 9955HX to test against, the G16 averaged between 7 and 16% FPS higher than the ROG Zephyrus G16 and G14, each with the same GPU, when tested at the same resolutions in these games.
Given the charging issues I experienced, I had to carry the power brick any time I needed the system for more than a few hours without worrying about using power saving options which can lower performance. The weight of the system is already at the line for being too bulky and that pushes it over as a daily carry.
With that aside, the system itself is reliable outside of its middle-of-the-road battery life. The chassis is solid and the hinge is stable. The keyboard is decent enough that it doesn’t stand out negatively and the trackpad, while on the small side, works well. The screen and speakers are definite standouts, and with hardware at the level it offers, there’s little that it cannot do. It’s not a standout in some ways, but if you don’t need features like best-in-class battery life or extra ports, it’s a good pick for maximizing in-game framerates.
Christopher Coke has been a regular contributor to IGN since 2019 and has been covering games and technology since 2013. He has covered tech ranging from gaming controllers to graphics cards, gaming chairs and gaming monitors, headphones, IEMs, and more for sites such as MMORPG.com, Tom’s Hardware, Popular Science, USA Today’s Reviewed, and Popular Mechanics. Find Chris on Twitter @gamebynight.
]]>Great RPGs can live or die by their final chapters – what's been built up through a long journey could pay off with major revelations that leave a lasting mark or fall flat with cliches that undermine its best ideas. I spent over 100 hours with Octopath Traveler 0, and although I'd say about 80 of those are pretty good overall thanks to a fair share of ups and downs, it's those last 20-or-so hours where it ascends to true greatness. If that sounds far too daunting, I get it, it's a big time investment – but what you get in return is something that only games of this scale can pull off, making good on its various story branches and stunning you with one moment after another as you approach its wild conclusion. While Octopath already had a brilliant turn-based combat system, this iteration adds its own quirks to freshen things up as the HD-2D art style delivers its unique brand of modernized nostalgia yet again. And along with an outstanding soundtrack to beautifully frame both pivotal and quiet moments alike, Octopath Traveler 0 shows that this series can and has pushed the genre to new heights.
Octopath Traveler 0 is largely a repackaging of the mobile game Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, which is a prequel to the original entry. But by axing the microtransations and gacha elements used to recruit party members, as well as introducing some very important additions to story and gameplay, it has become a fully fledged RPG worthy of this wider release. I'm a bit shocked that this game in particular was once a mobile exclusive because it's built as a traditional RPG, and I'm thrilled it exists in this form since I would have otherwise missed out on some of my favorite moments from any recent game.
However, it's not always a smoothly paved road, and I'm not terribly surprised as any 100-hour game leaves plenty of room for valleys between its peaks. Story is where I had most of my reservations in the first half-or-so, and while I wasn't expecting the most beautifully written script or deepest character study, I found some of the dialogue and plot beats rather shallow. Comically evil villains made for bosses who were satisfying to take down, but when their unabashed cruelty and simple thirst for power is the primary hook without much nuance, I didn't feel quite as compelled by them as characters. But despite the inconsistent quality of its storytelling, Octopath Traveler 0 still runs at a decent pace and doesn't sit on any one thread for too long.
That's mainly due to how the main quest is structured. After a tragic prologue where your hometown is burned to the ground, you're given three story branches in order to pursue the trio of villains who were responsible. Themed around power, fame, and wealth, those three paths then converge into a conclusion for what is roughly the first half of the overall story (at about 40 hours). And don't be fooled by the fakeout credits roll, because you've barely seen what Octopath Traveler 0 has up its sleeve. It then splits into three new questlines that pick up those themes once again, and although they retread similar territory, the stakes get higher as more of Octopath's world gets involved and your understanding of it deepens. Warring kingdoms and corrupt religious institutions across the land of Orsterra, where betrayal is more common than loyalty, start to face greater consequences as the full picture comes into focus and the story gains real momentum.
Rather than trying to build eight separate stories for characters that have to run in parallel, this game is able to tell a tighter tale by weaving its themes together, putting your custom character at the center of it, and elevating the important figures when needed. While your silent protagonist may seem like a typical "chosen one," having the story revolve around the world's eight rings that grant godly power turns a cliche setup into a strong foundation for its deeper messages. Octopath Traveler 2 was very successful with its cast of eight and made for one of my favorite games of the last decade, but this change of pace is a smart direction. Unfortunately it does mean most of the 30-plus party members you can recruit through sidequests feel rather disposable, but the dissonance that creates is worth the trade-off.
And like many of the seemingly frivolous features of Octopath Traveler 0, that roster eventually means something important in the grand scheme. There's a reason why you want to recruit as many of these characters as possible, and this pays off in unpredictable ways that even had me – someone who's played nearly every major JRPG under the sun – absolutely stun-locked. That's a powerful example of how this game makes you care about the seemingly mundane things in retrospect and earns its big moments. Perhaps it could've benefitted from trimming its lesser parts (especially where it runs into problematic tropes or naive politics), but the time you spend along the main questlines builds an intimate understanding of the people who embody Orsterra and the leaders you collaborate with in earnest.
Avoiding any specific spoilers, once you hit the "final" questline, Octopath Traveler 0 mashes the gas and does not stop; it almost felt like I was playing a whole new game. Dungeons get more intricate, boss fights get a lot tougher, character arcs come full circle, and motives begin to make much more sense. Plenty of stories go for the complex and sympathetic villain or antihero, but the true antagonist of this tale represents an incredibly thoughtful, fully realized, heartwrenching, and intense exploration of this archetype. I was floored by the revelations therein because of how they're grounded in things that feel real, with both gameplay mechanics and music wielded as storytelling devices to paint a complete picture without having to explain itself out loud. The more I peel back the layers that make its final chapters so moving, the more it's stuck with me well after I rolled credits on the 0-exclusive true ending after 106 hours on the dot.
I've been on record saying Octopath Traveler 2 has one of my favorite turn-based combat systems ever; it shines here as well and for slightly different reasons. The Boost and Break systems give the typical dynamic of hitting elemental affinities some extra depth to devising how turns should play out. Playing the guessing game of discovering what enemies are weak against gets a little tiresome, but once that part is solved, scheming for your plan of attack based on turn order to Break enemies and tee up the big hits is oh so satisfying. Building each party members' Boost points to add extra hits or increase spell potency gives you something to plan around for turns well in advance. And lining up all these variables while juggling the threat of hard-hitting bosses, who can impose some impactful status ailments or wipe party members in one turn, had me feeling like a genius tactician. Octopath might be playing on our nostalgia with its HD-2D retro-style visuals, yet this series has continually set a high bar for turn-based combat systems in modern gaming.
Party composition is quite different this time around since you have eight active party members at all times – four in the front row and four in the back. With well over 30 characters in my roster, it's an overwhelming amount to process and manage. While the fundamentals of Octopath's combat system are familiar, matching character duos for the row they occupy is a unique strategic layer that allows for a lot of flexibility. And because they all build Boost points individually, you can dole out the big hits more frequently and keep up a brisker pace in battle compared to previous entries. You sacrifice individual character depth, however, as each party member has just one Job to progress through (aside from your protagonist), but you can at least master specific Job skills to then equip on other characters to diversify their moveset.
I found Octopath Traveler 2's character progression more meaningful, especially as it tied to their individual stories, but Octopath 0 offers a welcome change of pace that hits the turn-based highs that've made the series special. The slow-motion cinematic camera cuts for Max Boost attacks and each party member's tide-turning limit break still get me hyped up, giving combat the visual flair that truly makes the HD-2D style stand out when the action picks up. The tactical considerations you need to make in order to inflict damage well past the 9,999 soft limit requires effort and foresight that isn't spelled out for you, but figuring out how to wield these systems and mechanics yourself is as satisfying as it is necessary to stand a chance in late game fights. Random encounters throughout dungeons and the overworld get overbearing, but that tedium pales in comparison to the gratification of landing a Break and busting out every full-powered ability to overcome a boss you had no business defeating.
While that turn-based combat supports much of the A-plot I’ve already praised, there's also a B-plot that revolves around reconstructing your hometown of Wishvale. In the process of bringing it back to life narratively, you actually rebuild it with a town-building system in a similar vein as Fallout 4 or Ni no Kuni 2. You collect crafting materials naturally throughout which then allow you to build housing, shops, and decor within certain parameters on a grid-based layout. It’s an enjoyable side activity, with tangible benefits that come from new buildings and recruiting new residents, such as discounted shop prices, a self-sufficient flow of materials, and a training ground for inactive party members to continue leveling up. Town building may seem optional at first and isn't particularly deep, but it becomes almost essential the further you get, especially when you consider the story's broader message about what home means to you and the people you care for. And seeing the town you put together yourself in the background of cutscenes is a heartwarming touch that is its own small emotional reward.
This questline's story can be a bit cheesy at times, but its heart is in the right place as it gets sentimental about what it takes to rebuild after losing everything. Like the previous game, the way poverty shapes a person and going from nothing to something remains a prominent motif, and even though it fumbles the messaging at times here, it's willing to talk about those topics with clarity. In the same way the branching questlines eventually converge sensibly, the town-building system and story attached to it enrich the main quest in tangible ways. By having you take the actions necessary to pick up the pieces and offer survivors some semblance of the past lives of your hometown, Octopath Traveler 0's overarching themes about holding onto your humanity comes across as more genuine.
After 100-plus hours, I look back on this journey often teary eyed. Its prevailing messages and star characters really resonated with me, offering perspectives on how tragedy changes people. That hits hardest when I listen back to my favorite songs on the soundtrack that evoke those feelings. Series composer Yasunori Nishiki has a particular style that lends itself extremely well to the genre, but is an absolute madman when you break down the musicality of his work, especially here in Octopath Traveler 0. A rock orchestra with swelling strings, horns, and drums (sometimes backed by opera vocals and chanting choirs) boss battle themes make me feel like I can run through a wall; hell, even the initial normal battle theme slaps hard. It's also in the softer town themes that round things out, and specific motifs that punctuate important moments and work their way into the most impactful songs. Twice during late game bosses, I had to put my controller down absolutely stunned by what I was hearing before picking it back up and using the power of music to propel me to victory – so yeah, Yasunori Nishiki deserves to be mentioned alongside the GOATs.
]]>Destiny has always been the "we’ve got Star Wars at home" looter shooter, and with Destiny 2: Renegades, Bungie has decided to lean into that directly with a crossover expansion. Weirdly enough, that decision has worked out for the most part! Renegades doesn’t solve many of Destiny 2’s longstanding issues, including the fact that it’s been awkwardly spinning its wheels for over a year now (reminiscent of the MCU post-Endgame), but embracing the cheesiness and over-the-top drama of Star Wars is at the very least a surprisingly nice change of pace for what has otherwise become quite a predictable universe. Sure, the story is as corny and derivative as can be, and the new activity you’re encouraged to grind repeatedly starts to feel thin before that tale even concludes, but the few new mechanics, vehicles, and weapon types we do get are interesting enough, and the endgame activity is well-worth setting aside a few hours to run through. If you were waiting for a game-changing expansion to warrant diving back into Destiny 2, this isn’t it, but it’s not the worst way to pass your time if you’ve got a hankering for some looter shooter goodness or just love Star Wars.
If you’ve read any of my previous expansion reviews (of which there are a lot), then you’ll already know I am a weirdo Destiny fan who has stuck with this game through thick and thin – so it should mean something when I tell you that saying I am also a Star Wars fan would be such a massive understatement that I’m actually too embarrassed to elaborate further publicly. But even with my undying love of space wizards, I was initially mortified to learn Destiny 2 was planning a crossover with it. For me, it was the ultimate sign that Destiny was out of ideas, had gone "full Fortnite" in a way that seemed cheap and tacky, and was making one last desperation play during the slow death it’s been suffering for a number of years now. And, yeah, that all pretty much turned out to be true. But when I found myself watching two lightsaber-wielding foes square off in an epic cutscene while listening to the John Williams-esque music this expansion makes heavy use of, I’ll admit it won me over... at least a little.
Renegades does go out of its way to include every little Star Wars reference to a degree that can feel a bit forced – a crutch that’s continuously leaned upon in lieu of original ideas. For example, in the very first mission alone, you’ll find yourself trapped in a garbage compactor, rescuing someone from off-brand carbon freezing, and making a jump to lightspeed while a brooding, laser sword-wielding masked villain angrily watches you escape his grasp. It’s extremely on the nose stuff, and I was just as likely to experience a full-body cringe as I was to smile about it. But the complete "screw it" energy at play here as it full-throatedly embraces all the corniness and drama for which Star Wars is known does have a certain kind of refreshing charm that’s at least a distinct direction for Destiny 2. I’ve been complaining about this game feeling stale for at least five years now, so I’ve got to give Bungie a bit of credit for trying something new here.
Sadly, the neat Star Wars-inspired story is weighed down by quite a bit of added fat that presumably is there in hopes you won’t notice how short Renegades would be without it. In between the precious few story missions, you’ll be sent off to run the new Lawless Frontier activity (more on that later), which drip feeds little bits of info before the next real mission actually moves the plot forward. Many of the non-filler quests use the same maps as the Lawless Frontier as well, but they’re at least filled with more unique stuff to do, like one quest where you blow up what looks an awful lot like Jabba’s sail barge in front of what looks an awful lot like the sarlacc pit (also known as the Great Pit of Carkoon). To its credit, it does introduce some interesting characters like Aunor, who is basically just a Jedi Knight, and Dredgen Bael, our emotional red leather daddy Sith Lord, who spends all his time aura farming and making my wife squeal with alarming delight. The whole thing wraps up with a pretty satisfying ending, too, despite doing very little to move the actual overarching story in Destiny 2 forward at all.
The Lawless Frontier activity that Renegades repeatedly pushes you towards works like an extremely barebones extraction shooter. You and two others are dropped into one of three maps and directed towards a series of the typical combat-heavy chores for which Destiny is known, like carrying objects to a drop point while under fire or defending a zone while standing on a plate. Along the way, you collect loot boxes you then need to try and extract with before time runs out or you run out of the finite number of revives your team is given. And, of course, no extraction mode is complete without rival players being able to come in and ruin your day, which is accomplished via a solo invasion mode where you jump into someone else’s game and try to score a few kills to grab some quick loot.
The three map options are great, as each reworks an existing location within the Destiny universe to fit with the Star Wars theme. The icy Europa now looks a whole lot more like Hoth, with anti-aerial canons and frozen bunkers; Mars has been turned into the dune seas and canyons of Tatooine, but is sadly missing Banthas; And Venus has been transformed into a part-swampland, part-forest that plays off of Dagobah and Endor/Kashyyyk, respectively. For Star Wars fans of all stripes, seeing stuff like this is just rad, though it would have been nice if they’d put as much work into the baddies we’re fighting – aside from the Cabal wearing white Stormtrooper-adjacent armor, we’re basically just fighting the same handful of enemies we’ve been blasting for years.
As a non-invading player, Lawless Frontier is initially a strong game mode that gets less exciting each time you’re asked to do it (which is a whole lot). At first, the idea of killing loads of baddies in levels that are extremely enemy-dense and getting a whole lot of loot is pretty great, but once you’ve played each of the three maps and extraction scenarios a couple times, you’ll pretty quickly have these regions and all their secrets down to a science, leaving you to rinse and repeat the same handful of encounters ad nauseum – in other words, pretty typical Destiny stuff. It gets even worse when you realize that means you’re going to have to hear the same handful of conversations and one-liners so frequently that you’ll find yourself hearing them in your sleep. The good news is that the grind actually comes with some pretty stellar rewards this time, as I was able to get a whole bunch of cool stuff, like my first complete set of Tier 5 armor, after only a handful of hours grinding. If there were a bit more variety to the maps and encounters within Lawless Frontier, the grind to greater power and weapon rolls would have been a lot more enjoyable.
Helping break up the monotony though are Renegade Abilities, a new mechanic that lets you call in helpful support ordinances to assist you in battle. These could be things like a dome of healing light for you and your teammates or an airstrike that bombards the battlefield with explosions. As you level up your reputation by playing the Lawless Frontier, you’ll unlock new abilities along the way, including one that lets you summon a massive AT-ST-inspired mech called the Behemoth – a tool that can completely change the tide of battle during a high-level encounter. All of these are really nice, although they only work while in the Lawless Frontier extraction mode, and I’ll admit it made me pretty bummed out every time I was off doing something else like the story missions or the Dungeon activity and no longer had access to them. It’s probably too much to ask that something this powerful be available all the time, but it’s convinced me that we could use something similar to this across Destiny 2 more generally. After all, it’s sorta hard to go back to not having these cool toys after you’ve spent a dozen hours relying on them and leveling them up.
As for invading, as much as I had fun showing up and ruining other players’ games, the entire feature feels pretty out of place, as though it was only included because PvP is an obligatory element of an extraction shooter. When invading, it’s usually easy enough to score a few kills and make off with some quick loot, which is a really efficient way to gather gear, but it just feels wrong interrupting other players who are distracted with the mission before them and surrounded by NPC enemies.
And as the person being invaded, there’s not really any incentive to sweat it anyway – although you have a limited number of revives, you’re also given extra revives when you get invaded to offset any potential loss, which makes the stakes basically nonexistent. Sure, you can get a couple extra loot boxes by killing your invader, but it’s a pittance given how much loot this activity generates regardless. And since each match can only be invaded once, it’s extremely common for an unwelcome guest to appear early on, getting the PvP distraction out of the way right off the bat before proceeding with the actual extraction regardless of the outcome.
If invaders were incentivized to kill players until their run fails, or the people being invaded were given something more substantial for successfully fending off their attacker, I could see this mechanic being extremely cool, but it mostly just feels tacked on right now. Don’t get me wrong – I still spent enough time invading others to earn my red lightsaber crystal, because I’m a terrible person, but the whole system could have been executed better.
Speaking of which: lightsabers! Yeah, those are in Destiny 2 now (though they’re called Praxic Blades), and they’re basically as cool as you’d think. You can throw them like Vader trying to decapitate his own son, use them to deflect incoming fire back at your enemies like you’re picking off clankers in the Clone Wars, or just get in close for good ol’ fashioned Kylo-Ren-sticking-it-to-dear-old-dad action. The quest to unlock your very own saber is also one of the best in the expansion, and a lot of the endgame in Renegades revolves around unlocking various saber colors or mods to make your laser sword even cooler. Are they hugely different from the swords that already existed in Destiny 2? No, not really. But they’re enough of a tweak to be interesting while also just being way cool. Hard for me to get mad about that!
Luckily the Praxic Blade isn’t the only fresh tool in your arsenal, as Renegades also introduces a new weapon type called Heat Weapons. The idea behind these is that they’re Star Wars blasters that don’t need to be reloaded, but generate heat that occasionally requires a cooldown. I hate reloading in games, so this is a nice option for the impatient among us, even if waiting for heat to dissipate is effectively the same thing. Either way, they’re an interesting new wrinkle to Destiny 2’s growing arsenal of weapons, plus they make cool Star Wars pew-pew blaster sounds when you shoot them, which I think is the real headline here.
Once you’ve completed the brief story and run enough Lawless Frontier to be sick of it, the final hurdle is the raid-lite activity called Equillibrium. It’s the endgame finale filled with challenging mechanics and beautiful setpieces you’d expect, and awards some absolutely awesome loot that I won’t spoil here. These so-called Dungeons are some of Destiny 2’s best content, and Equilibrium is certainly no exception, with the Star Wars flair adding a much-needed change in style and tone. The bosses, which include a dual-saber wielding ninja badass, are memorable and fun to figure out, and the enemy-dense areas and platforming sections were a joy to explore. It’s worth noting that the entire thing is pretty short, and can be comfortably beaten in under two hours without much issue (it felt a lot easier than some of the previous dungeon activities), but I don’t have many complaints overall – it was time well-spent and I’m likely to play it again with friends in pursuit of the unique loot.
]]>The pitch for Unbeatable is an enticing one: a visually striking rhythm-adventure hybrid about a punk rock rebellion in a dystopian city where music is illegal – kinda like Jet Set Radio meets a more story-focused Taiko no Tatsujin, which is great in theory. But the promise of that concept doesn’t always line up with the disjointed yet heartfelt mess we actually got. Unbeatable positions itself as a mix of both story-driven exploration and pulse-pounding musical battles, but what that means in practice is a conversation-heavy walking simulator with occasional rhythm segments and a few genuinely brilliant moments awkwardly wedged in... plus an endless arcade mode that has some real promise. That’s where the rhythm game "meat" is hidden away, and it’s decently fun for a few hours with a great selection of tracks and plenty of challenges to unlock, though it’s a shame part of its selection is locked behind day-one DLC.
Welcome to a world where music is illegal, nobody remembers what it is, and, miraculously, you’re the only one who can bring it back! The story mode follows the vocalist Beat and her bandmates as they fight against HARM – a police force defending the music ban with lethal imprecision. The musical names and quirky characters would be charming if the writing supported them with consistent cleverness or emotional weight. Instead, what you get is a script that infrequently touches on what it really feels like to try and become a musician in a world that barely has space for you. The rest of it reads like a long back-and-forth Discord conversation between teenagers who think random equals funny. It works well in short bursts, but gets tiresome across the roughly eight-hour campaign.
It’s a shame that there’s this much filler between the parts that are genuinely moving, especially towards the end. But even during those latter parts, Unbeatable lurches from location to location with minimal clear connective tissue. One moment you’re talking to a guard in prison, the next you’re suddenly in the prison cafeteria with no transition or explanation. Then the camera cuts again and you’re asleep. Then you’re in the factory doing work detail. Now you’re skateboarding on a pair of headphones through an entire platoon of guards. There is some logic behind these transitions, but most of the time, Unbeatable’s zones are disorganized – its story feels like a cassette tape of vignettes that just teleport you between scenes, doing the bare minimum to show you how you got there, and that happens constantly throughout. It's disorienting in the worst way – not as an artistic choice, but as a failure of basic storytelling. There are even a few drawn-out dialogue sequences that repeat themselves multiple times – you’ll literally see the exact same cutscene or conversation recycled for no clear reason.
But what’s most shocking about Unbeatable is how little rhythm gameplay actually exists in the story mode before the final chapter. You'll spend the vast majority of your time running through empty environments, talking to poorly-written NPCs, and participating in mandatory minigames that have nothing to do with the core rhythm gameplay found in the arcade mode. For instance, there's a bartending minigame with obnoxiously loud jazz providing sound cues. There's a batting cage that appears out of nowhere. You'll close sluices in a sewer in a "puzzle" that has you running back and forth while your incompetent bandmates keep turning valves back on as a "joke." Even when rhythm sections do appear, they're sometimes completely disconnected from what's happening in the story – you might be mid-conversation, and suddenly you're in a yard fighting someone with no setup or context. Thirty seconds later, it’s over and you’re back in your bunk talking about something else.
The story itself centers on bringing music back to the city by being punk rock rebels, which is a perfectly serviceable concept. But the execution is often so shallow and heavy-handed that it hardly feels like anything real is at stake until the emotional payoff at the very end, after the credits are already rolling. The villains are also written like annoying teenagers rather than any kind of credible threat. It's trying desperately to be edgy and rebellious, but never actually lets you in on what you're rebelling against or what rebellion truly costs in this world.
As a result, that world feels less like a believable dystopia and more like a caricature designed solely for game mechanics to happen in. Everything is music-themed to an absurd degree – you tie headphones to your feet to escape prison, Beat stops every few minutes to argue with another character about the specifics of being in a band, and every named NPC you meet is vaguely named after musical terms. It's aesthetic-driven to the point of parody, but the message it’s trying to communicate still somehow takes itself too seriously to lean into that absurdity effectively.
The silver lining is that if you’re big into music, you’ll appreciate a lot of these references, but Unbeatable tragically struggles to decide on a tone. It's simultaneously trying to be an irreverent internet-humor comedy and a heartfelt story about found family and artistic expression. Those two approaches could theoretically coexist, but Unbeatable rarely demonstrates the writing chops to pull it off. The result is a game that hamfists its themes into each interaction with breathless exposition and forced drama, with cutesy characters who desperately want you to think they're clever.
When Unbeatable actually lets you play its rhythm game, you can get through it by pressing exactly two buttons. You're either hitting ground opponents or jumping to hit aerial enemies, all synced to the beat. It's functionally similar to Theatrhythm Final Bar Line. To its credit, the rhythm synchronization at least works well – this review was played on PC at 1440p with a 180Hz G-Sync monitor, and the beats lined up perfectly with the refresh rate.
The problem is that, with only two real inputs, Unbeatable has nowhere to go for additional difficulty except "more notes, faster." On Normal difficulty, songs are almost laughably easy. Crank it up to Hard or Expert, and suddenly the screen is filled with so many simultaneous inputs while the camera shakes, zooms, and bounces around that it becomes overwhelming without necessarily being rewarding. You're just trying to parse visual chaos. That said, there is at least a welcome option to turn off the VHS filter enabled by default, which just makes everything look unnecessarily glitchy, as well as a reduced camera motion option, which is a good accessibility feature given how much it can bounce around during rhythm sections.
The music selection itself is at least decent overall. The story mode is a bit more middling; aside from the main themes and songs played by the virtual band, the campaign’s filler tracks feel like what people imagine Portland's indie music scene sounds like when they're making fun of it. But the saving grace is that Beat’s band puts out a few bangers before the end of the story. The arcade mode also has good music from top to bottom, which goes a long way toward making it a lot more fun to play than the story itself. There are tracks from artists like Alex Moukala and Peak Divide that are genuinely great. It’s a little questionable that some of them are locked behind day-one DLC, but you don’t need to pay extra for plenty of excellent beat maps that come along for free.
The arcade mode is structured like a proper rhythm game with unlockable songs, an expansive and fun-to-complete challenge board, leaderboards, and a good selection of difficulty tiers ranging from Beginner up past Expert and beyond. It has the replayability and polish that the main story mode completely lacks. Drop the "adventure" and that's where the actual, complete game lives.
One thing Unbeatable does nail is its looks, with a strong punk rock aesthetic and standout anime fusion art direction. The 2D character cutouts layered into cartoonish 3D environments look great, especially in locations like the town and beach, where the late afternoon light dances off the ocean. The pause menu also has this cool scratchy vinyl aesthetic that really sells the punk vibe. When you pause a session, there's a neat record-scratch effect. These are the moments where you can see the vision underneath Unbeatable’s jank.
But strong art direction can't save poor game design. For instance, the camera is frequently positioned in ways that make navigating each level confusing. You'll often need to run toward areas of the screen that are partially obstructed by walls to trigger the camera to pan to the next room, leading to constant moments where you're just wandering around trying to figure out where you're supposed to go. And these environments feel empty and lifeless, more like stage sets than actual places.
The UX is similarly messy. At first, it looks pretty clean due to a straightforward menu system and sharp dialogue boxes that have a cool, comic-book-inspired vibe to them. The rhythm gameplay cues are solid in the main rhythm game (the one you play during key story moments and in the arcade mode), but are totally incoherent in some of the minigames, like the game where you have to do quality control for bombs in the prison or mix drinks to screechy jazz music. And more than once, dialogue boxes will pile on top of one another or slide to the bottom corner of the screen as NPCs run straight into the camera or off-camera entirely.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Unbeatable is that there are moments that really do show promise. There’s a train sequence where your band is playing music while fighting enemies that’s genuinely cool, but it doesn’t arrive until several hours in. These highlights come way too late, and are immediately followed by more filler. It's almost like the entire game was built around the most promising sections of Unbeatable’s impressive demo from back in 2021, padding them out with fetch quests, repeated cutscenes, and unnecessary minigames rather than making more of what actually worked. That demo framed these moments as representative of the full experience when they're actually the exceptions amidst hours of aimless wandering.
]]>Intelligent, stylish, and brutally hands-off, Routine is one of the most terrifying — and at times terrifyingly frustrating — horror games I've played for some time. Confident and cruel, it's a masterclass in show-don't-tell horror that freaked me out far more than I'd like to admit... and that's coming from a bona fide horror veteran.
All five of my senses are permanently on high alert. My ears constantly strain for the sound of stomping footfalls and humming electronics. My eyes dance about in the darkness, looking for a place to hide. My hands — misshapen and perma-clawed from clutching the controller so tightly — genuinely ache from stress. And yes, I can almost smell it here, too. Dust. Decay. Decades-old recirculated air lying over an unmistakable note of fried circuits. When I feel this overwhelmed, I'd typically cower behind a Pause screen to bring my blood pressure back down, but I can't even do that: bringing up the menu doesn’t actually pause anything, which means you can die — and I have — while adjusting your settings. Thanks, Dead Space.
There are only two horror games I've never been able to complete: Alien: Isolation and the very first Outlast game. Both scare the bejesus out of me, chiefly because there's no way to predict when a jumpscare is coming, but also because I absolutely hate being chased by things I can't kill. Routine delivers all of this and more, ratcheting up the fear through the very clever, very intentional design choices it makes, such as manual save points (NO!), randomized puzzles so you can't cheese them or look stuff up (ARGH!), and some truly devilish creature design that feels as though it's been plucked directly from my own nightmares (HELP ME).
Announced way back in 2012 — two years before the release of Creative Assembly's aforementioned Alien: Isolation, with which it shares much of its DNA — Routine is one of the most atmospheric games I've played in ages (and I do mean all games, not just horror ones). You, a software engineer dispatched to resolve a malfunctioning security system, arrive at Union Plaza, a tourist resort on the Moon, although there are no tourists, no staff, and barely even a functioning facility left. And despite the technical accomplishments that apparently got us to the Moon, everything in Union Plaza is gloriously old-fashioned. Like The Jetsons or the original Alien movie, it presents a dated, almost naïve vision of the future, with green-hued CRT terminals, limited technology, and fabulously 70s-esque patterned wallpaper.
Take your trusty CAT, aka your Cosmonaut Assistance Tool. Yes, it lets you overload electronics, track clues, see in the dark, and gain important security clearance, but it's also a boxy gizmo that kinda looks like an 1980s video camera, complete with a cripplingly bleak battery life. Using it requires manual interaction — modules need to be physically slotted into place, and connecting to the short-span wi-fi requires a manual button press. All of it is delightfully fiddly, right up until you realize you may need to manually change out your modules while a Type-05 (a deeply unpleasant mechanical facsimile of a humanoid) is gunning for you, or you can't save until you find a wireless access point, which may or may not have a murderous robot patrolling just in front of it.
And Routine gives nothing away. Absolutely nothing. No hints, no clues, no flashing items, no "Stuck? Click here!" lifeline. Admirably reserved, it's content to leave you fumbling in the dark for hours if need be, utterly unfazed by your frustration until you, say, accidentally spot a vent you somehow didn't notice before. It's deliciously cunning game design that I hate every bit as much as I admire, only elevated further by its careful use — or sometimes lack thereof — of sound effects and unsettling bangs and thuds in the distance.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, there's also no HUD. You never really know what state your health is in, which means you’re never certain how many times one of the creepy automatons can grab you before it's game over. You only know how many shots you have left in your CAT by "physically" picking it up and looking at the battery life. You don't helpfully zoom in when you're reading a dimly backlit screen, which can make reading memos and emails on flickering displays pretty tricky. Logging into things takes time you may ill afford thanks to 1980s engineering and a groaning dial-up system... especially when you learn that, yes, enemies can drag you out of your hiding place if they see you get into it.
It's those emails and memos that really flesh out the story here, though, which is surprising given how missable they are (and how easy it is to get turned around and think you've already explored somewhere that you haven't). I can't say I thought it all made sense, or was wonderfully satisfactory or unique at the end — too many loose ends and unanswered questions meant it didn't quite stick the landing for me — but Routine's curious story certainly kept me hooked.
But even for me — someone absolutely terrified of being stalked in the dark by unkillable machines — Routine loses a little of its luster partway through its roughly six-hour campaign. What once freaked me out began to wind me up instead. Manual saving is novel right up until, say, your PC crashes, and the hands-off puzzling is impressive all the way until you're fully, palpably lost and have no idea how to progress. You cannot reacquaint yourself with your current objective unless you are at a save station, or choose when to activate your flashlight, or even carry a spare battery with you. There's no map which, for someone with the directional sense of a turtle spinning on its back — also me! — is woefully cruel. And not being able to pause is an interesting wrinkle right up until you get an important phone call or the dog stands in front of the TV.
From this point on, even the Type-05s feel a little humdrum. The stomping of their feet means it's impossible for one to sneak up behind you, and they're outrageously stupid, often unable to find you even if they chase you into an open elevator and you're crouching behind a box six inches away. Half the time, all they do is interrupt you, like a puppy with a new ball. That doesn't mean I don't often wish I could permanently disable them — knocking them temporarily offline just doesn't make me feel safe enough, which is obviously why permakilling them isn't an option — but there's so much "ammo" around (read: batteries) that you can often neutralize them and slip away without incident. Nor does it mean they don't freak me out (they do) or that I got acclimated to the tension (I didn't), but given that the enemies just aren't that clever, they're pretty easy to lose. (That said, I can't help but wish for a SOMA-esque 'Safe' mode to allow me to explore to my heart's content.)
As for the puzzles? Few stumped me for long — it's fear that held me back, not the puzzle design — but I think some will be confused by them, not least because developer Lunar Software's lack of signposting means it's easy to overlook clues. If you take nothing else from my words today, though, you owe it to yourself to try to get through as much of Routine as you can without succumbing to a guide. Most puzzles are logical, sometimes maddeningly so, and it's always a rush when you realize the solution can be found by fiddling with the settings on your CAT. And that's what I loved best, I think. Those intelligent puzzles, intuitive tools, and a deeply unsettling atmosphere may not work for all, but they sure did impress me.
]]>There are a lot of skateboarding games, and I feel like I’ve played most of them. Some of them are majestic. Some are not. The Simpsons Skateboarding was the absolute pits. Tony Hawk: Ride was tortuous pain. This year’s Skate is a microtransaction hellscape.
Enter Skate Story. Like those latter examples, it too is a trip to skateboarding hell and a study in pain. In this case, however, that’s actually the whole point of this extremely peculiar journey through perdition on a piece of 7-ply. I wasn’t always aboard for the sheer and utter weirdness of Skate Story’s broader adventure, but there’s no doubt developer Sam Eng has successfully married it to a robust and approachable set of skate mechanics – and it certainly makes for a memorable skateboarding game like no other I’ve ever played.
Skate Story is a slightly tricky game to describe, if only because attempting to even discuss the plot sounds a little like you’re making it up on the spot. The deal is you’re a demon made out of glass and pain, marooned in Hell. It’s referred to as The Underworld, more specifically – but the Devil is here, either way. I know this because I have his pants.
From the Devil comes a deal. That is, you can be free on one condition: you find a way to flip, grind, and manual your way to the moon – and eat it. For some reason.
Are you still following? Because I haven’t even got to the frog barista yet. Or the subway train with legs.
I’m hesitant to say much else lest I spoil any of the particularly quirky developments along the way, so just be aware Skate Story is an incredibly weird trip through a bizarre underworld. To be candid, this isn’t really the kind of thing I’d typically seek out. That is, the stories I like normally feature big guys causing problems in small towns, assassins with grudges, or pictures of fighter planes on the cover. That is, I’m more David Leitch than David Lynch, if that makes sense. Skate Story did largely win me over, though. There were definitely moments I found myself getting a little numb to the weirdness, on account of just how offbeat it sometimes gets, but overall I admire the commitment to its surrealistic vision.
Its story is told via text that you can read through at your own pace. There’s no voice acting or voiceover – and there’s an argument to be mounted that it might’ve gained a bit of gravity from some kind of baritone narration à la The Stanley Parable or Bastion – but Skate Story’s finely honed soundtrack means there’s still plenty to listen to. Assembled by New Jersey band Blood Cultures, the music is a generous mix of the group’s experimental, electro-pop sound, and it ranges in tempo and intensity as the locations and pace of the levels vary. This sort of music is also comfortably out of my usual wheelhouse, but nonetheless I found it extremely evocative and catchy, and it suits Skate Story to a T. It fabulously complements The Underworld’s abstract environments, and the atmosphere of its eternal night backdrop.
Don’t be fooled by Skate Story's grainy, low-fi look, either; this is one of the most eye-catching and imaginative-looking games I’ve played in recent memory. Its psychedelic vision for a neon underworld blends jagged forests of spikes with broken slabs of ancient architecture, and twisted blocks of New York City with carpets of stars. Watching this wild world refract through a sneaker-clad demon made entirely of glass is certainly something.
The controls are not immediately intuitive, because they’re noticeably different from the approach taken by the sorts of dedicated sports-oriented skating games a lot of us are familiar with. That is, Skate Story doesn’t have tricks mapped to flicking an analogue stick around like the Skate series (or both analogue sticks, as in the case of something like Session). It’s more in line with playing something like Tony Hawk, only imagine someone remapped all the buttons.
Basic tricks are activated by a combination of either a shoulder button or trigger plus a face button, and grinds occur when you pop and land suitably on a rail or ledge. A variety of other, progressively more complex tricks are rationed out and taught to us as the story unfolds over its roughly six-hour duration. It’s not a revolutionary approach, sure, but it’s a smart one since having us always picking up new tricks keeps things fresh throughout. There was a moderate learning curve as I sought to archive decades of THPS muscle memory in order to learn Skate Story’s own specific trick system – but it didn’t take too long to come to grips with.
It’s all very grounded and weighty, which I like, and the tricks look great in motion with the low slung camera that tumbles to the ground like a physical object each time you bail and shatter to bits. I love how the powerslides feel, and I love the slow motion enders we’re rewarded with for our successes. When it comes to vibes, Skate Story nails the landing.
There’s a timing mechanism for executing tricks that results in different pop heights, which is illustrated by an on-screen doodle (a different shape for each trick). Depending on the speed of your skater, a marker will trace the doodle slowly or quickly – and there’s a sweet spot for getting max altitude – but I have to admit I generally paid little attention to it. On default settings, Skate Story never demanded a fastidious level of timing finesse to get through its levels and defeat bosses. This suits me just fine, but the fact that you can just essentially spam your way through a lot of the most frantic-looking segments may come across as a little trivial to anyone looking for a stiffer challenge.
Boss battles are handled in an interesting way, and to win these encounters you need to build up combos and "stomp" them down inside a marked zone. They can be cleared with a bit of mild button-mashing, but there’s certainly room to be much more deliberate about your trick selection and timing if you choose to (and you will, admittedly, accumulate better combos and deal more damage – and faster – if you do). There are also a number of small and trippy sandbox-style levels to cruise around with various objectives to complete, but some of these tasks do get disappointingly trivial. For instance, one mission that called on me to gather up a selection of floating letters sounded like a cute nod to Skate Story’s ancestors – but most of them were just hovering at ground level, turning what could’ve been a brief but fun challenge into a basic fetch quest across the map and back.
My favourite parts of Skate Story, however, were the speed segments, where you must hustle from your spawn point to an ethereal exit door – like some kind of haunted hill bomb. The music ramps up for these high-speed bursts, and I like the fast-paced trial-and-error nature of them as your fragile demon smashes to shards and you instantly get another crack. I always felt a little pang of regret when I reached the end of these runs, and I wish there were a few more of them.
]]>When you sit down with a game, you make a pact with it: you’ll push the buttons, and it will show you what happens when you do. A lot of games don’t really care to interrogate what that means, to use the physical realities of the medium to tell a story. Remember having to plug your controller into the second port of your PlayStation to fight Psycho Mantis? That’s rare. Instead, many of them are content to be films where you control the action. Rhythm Doctor is not one of those games.
In the eight or so hours I spent seeing its 1.0 version through to completion, Rhythm Doctor frustrated me, earned some laughs, made me tear up, and used this medium to tell a story in ways I’ve never seen a game do before. It is one of the most difficult rhythm games I’ve ever played, and one I couldn’t put down. Near the end, I felt like I might need a little rhythm therapy myself, a shock to the heart to keep me going. But I wanted to live in that world a little longer, listen to these songs a little more, spend a little more time with these characters. It was worth it. Rhythm Doctor drove me crazy, and I loved it.
In Rhythm Doctor, you are an intern assigned to Middlesea Hospital. You work remotely, so you sit behind a screen and watch what’s happening through the hospital’s cameras. The doctors and patients speak to you, but you cannot respond to them. Well, you can, but they can’t hear the intern. Like you as a player, the intern is part of this world but not of it. A participant, but not a resident. When you see yourself on screen, it is as a long arm hovering over a button. The patients sometimes jokingly call you Doctor Finger. It’s a brilliant bit of "player-as-character" that Rhythm Doctor makes the most of throughout its runtime. That this story features some absolutely gorgeous pixel art spritework is just a bonus.
The simple but extremely effective gimmick here is that Middlesea is experimenting with a new treatment that promotes healing by defibrillating patients’ hearts in time with their heartbeats. Your job is to press the button on the defibrillator in sync with the beat of their heart. That’s it. There is only one button. Press it every 7th beat in time with the patient’s heart. Line the beats up properly, and you’ll cure what ails them.
That might not sound hard, and it isn’t. At least at first. One, two, three, four, five, six, press is easy enough. But then you’ll get to polyrhythms, hemiolas, irregular time signatures, silent beats, the works. Again, all you have to do is press your button on every seventh beat. But it gets challenging quickly. I used to think I was good at rhythm games. I played Guitar Hero and Rock Band on Expert. I used to play a couple different instruments. After playing Rhythm Doctor, I no longer think that. Few games have challenged me like this did.
Sometimes you’ll be treating multiple patients at once, each with their own rhythm, and you’ll have to keep track of them simultaneously. Some may drop in and drop out. The excellent songs their hearts are beating to will abruptly change pace. You may have to hit notes in rapid succession or hold them or match a tempo you’ll hear and then have to reproduce. There is a visual indicator here, but it’s not going to hold your hand or tell you exactly when to press your lone button. You’ll have to keep pace yourself, and overcoming initially brutal levels was a thrill.
Rhythm Doctor will help you out – most levels feature a dedicated tutorial teaching you new concepts, certain beats are often preceded by unique sound effects to let you know they’re coming, and a nice nurse will often call out timing changes with a "Ready Get Set Go!" in time to the beat before the change occurs, but visual prompts are limited. There’s no "fit the note into this handy-dandy slot it's barreling towards" in Rhythm Doctor. You have to keep time. I often found myself tapping my other hand against my thigh, silently counting to seven, or moving my head from side to side.
And you’ll need to, because Rhythm Doctor likes to mess with you, to use the idea that you’re a guy behind a screen pressing buttons to tell its story. If you’re treating a patient while a virus is messing with your connection, you’ll feel it. There will be static, the beat will be thrown off, and things will pop up or fade out. At one point, a bunch of pop-ups saying "DISTRACTION!" overwhelm your screen. As a player, it’s annoying, especially if you’re somewhat reliant on visual cues. As a storytelling conceit, it’s dynamite. Dealing with that would be difficult and irritating, especially at work! I could practically hear the virus mocking me; J.K. Simmons breathing in my ear. "Not quite my tempo."
But that’s not the only time Rhythm Doctor pulls this trick. Sometimes, it will shrink your screen and bounce it around to the beat. Once, when Cole, a down on his luck musician with a caffeine addiction, rushes across the screen to get to Nicole, a barista at the hospital’s cafe who he’s grown fond of, the game window travels with him as you struggle to keep up via the hospital’s cameras, going entirely off your monitor before reappearing. Even the songs themselves tell a story: when a patient named Logan has trouble admitting his feelings for another named Hailey, their songs reflect it, and he often loses the beat during that level. As the two get closer across several songs, their heart rates grow closer in time. When he finally summons the courage to make it happen, the track resembles a duet at a Broadway show.
The songs here vary from showtunes to dubstep to techno and everything in-between, and each is used to tell a story like this. Every patient’s unique heart rhythm can and will show up in other tracks as they bond with one another, whether it’s a miner helping an injured baseball player rehab from an injury, an elderly couple at opposite ends of the hospital who long to see one another, or Cole and Nicole hash out their issues through song. In Rhythm Doctor, the music is part of the story. Each track moves the narrative forward, and gets to the heart of who these people are and how they feel about one another. You can treat a lot of things with medicine, but sometimes the only cure for a damaged heart is working through what caused it in the first place. I cared about these characters and their relationships, and I wanted to stick around.
That’s good, because you’ll probably have to. Rhythm Doctor holds you to a high standard. Cs may get you degrees, but you’ll need a B grade or better before you can move on to the next level. That can be a little frustrating if you get stuck, and I’m not ashamed to say I had to turn the difficulty down to clear some of the harder stages. Some even have "Night Shift" versions for an extra challenge and a bit more story, and there are several bonus levels to tackle as well, which are goofy and a lot of fun, like the one where a group of nurses pursues a limousine, kicking away projectiles the limo is hurling at them. Others are just chill vibes where you hang out with the characters.
Through it all, though, you’re reminded that while you’re part of this story, it’s not about you. Without spoilers, there’s a rather touching scene later on that you hear about but don’t witness because you’re busy helping another patient. Almost every other character is there, but you’re helping someone else, and the scene happens without you. You only hear the other characters react to it. On one level, it’s smart commentary on the limitations of being behind a screen and the role of the player; you’re not part of this world physically, not matter how badly you might want to be. Your job is to watch and press buttons. On another, it’s a reminder that no one recovery, no one part of the hospital, and no one patient, is less important than any other. It all matters. And there’s emotional resonance here. When one of Cole’s tracks says "Sometimes I’m angry I’m not doing better than I thought I’d do at this point," I had to pause the game for a moment. I’ve been there. I understand that feeling. I understood that character, and all his flaws. And I admired his persistence in spite of it all.
Rhythm Doctor also features some shockingly relevant commentary on the state of healthcare and capitalism. As the program you’re part of gains traction, there’s pressure from the hospital’s administrator (and head doctor) to expand it, eventually resulting in layoffs to hospital staff and overworked doctors. After all, why have staff when you can have a miracle treatment an intern in their pajamas can perform from their laptop? You don’t need people, right? Just results. Rhythm Doctor ends about as perfectly as it can given all the plates it’s spinning, but it’s nice that it never pulls punches. Nothing is free; everything has a cost, and that cost might be other people.
If you need a break from the story, there’s also a comprehensive level editor to play with and community tracks to download. I’ll be honest with y’all; I’m not much of a level editor cat, but what I’ve played of the community tracks is genuinely impressive. Rhythm Doctor’s soundtrack is so good that I’ve listened to it in between sessions, but it’s great to see developer 7th Beat Games turn their baby over to the community and say "go nuts." In a world obsessed with selling you something at every moment, editors like this feel increasingly rare, and I’m glad it’s here.
]]>The Samsung 9100 Pro is a big, powerful, flagship SSD from one of the biggest names in the game. It brings high-end performance, pushing the limits of its PCIexpress 5.0 interface– on paper, this should be one of the best SSDs ever made, accelerating file transfers and game load times like never before.
But Samsung wasn’t first to market with a top-tier PCIe 5.0 SSD, and there is stiff competition for the kind of cutting-edge performance that Samsung has historically been known for. Still, it is very fast on paper, with a strong endurance rating, five-year warranty, and the option of an attractive, low-profile heatsink for a few dollars extra.
This is a standard M.2 2280 drive, so the dimensions and form-factor will be very familiar for anyone with an NVMe SSD. Samsung sent me the heatsink version of the 9100 Pro and it’s clearly built to a high-standard, with a sturdy, compact design and well machined heatsink fins that give it a quality look and feel. It’s available without the heatsink too, though, should your motherboard have big heatsinks for add-in drives, or you want to use a third-party alternative.
It’s available in sizes from 1TB through 4TB at the time of writing (I’m testing the 2TB version), with plans to release an 8TB model down the line.
Forget CrystalDiskInfo, if you have a Samsung SSD you get to use the excellent Samsung Magician Software which combines detailed drive monitoring with easy data migration, secure erase, drive encryption, and performance benchmarks, among other useful settings and tests.
It’s not something everyone will feel the need to play around with, but if you want to keep a close eye on your new flagship SSD, Samsung’s Magician tracks drive health, system information, and has useful built-in tools like secure erase and drive encryption.
The specifications for the Samsung 9100 Pro are about as good as you can get with a modern, high-end PCIe 5 SSD. Although that’s never the full picture for any component, Samsung sets off on the right foot with this drive.
The 9100 Pro uses Samsung’s 236-layer TLC NAND Flash, which is the company’s most effective memory to date. This NAND is also used in the older 990 Evo Plus and 990 Pro models, but with a newer controller and interface, this drive is much faster.
The sustained read and write speeds of 14,700 MBps and 13,400 MBps, respectively, are competitive with other top PCIe 5 drives like Sandisk’s WD Black SN8100 and Crucial’s T710. While you’re unlikely to encounter these speeds outside of benchmarks and large file transfers, if you want to move a lot of data around between drives (ideally between two PCIe 5 drives) then the 9100 Pro should do it exceptionally quickly.
The random read and write performance is arguably more impressive, though, and highlights how far we’ve come in "smaller" capacity drives like this, showing how capable Samsung’s top flash designs are.
The endurance rating of 1200 TBW for this 2TB model (up to 4800 TBW for the 8TB model) is plenty for the average user, though there are more durable professional drives out there if you expect to hammer yours on a daily basis for professional workloads.
The Samsung 9100 Pro joins the high-end PCIe 5 market at a time of increasing competition. There are standouts like the Crucial T705 with its huge heatsink and impressive numbers leading the pack, but its high price of 260ドル reflects that. The WD SN8100 offers similar specs at a similar price, giving the 9100 Pro at 260ドル some real head to head action with little separating them. Ditch the heatsinks and their prices match up even closer.
Then there’s the slightly slower, but still fast Corsair MP700 Pro and Elite, which are still blazingly fast in real-world workloads, but significantly cheaper.
Considering the limited utility for the cutting-edge performance of a top PCIe 5 SSD in 2025, too, it’s also worth considering high-end PCIe 4 drives. Those include Samsung’s own 990 Pro, which is available at the same capacity for just 150ドル.
To test the 9100 Pro I fitted it to my test system with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, an Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero, 32GB of RAM at 5,200MHz and a Radeon RX 7900 XTX. I installed the drive in the top-most PCIe 5 NVMe slot and tested on a brand new installation of Windows 11 running the latest 24H2 version, with the latest drivers and BIOS updates applied.
In CrystalDiskMark, the 9100 Pro actually surpassed its rated sustained read and write performance showing how utterly fast this drive can be when shifting raw data around.
That was backed up by my 10GB file transfer test. Moving it from a PCIe 4 WD SN850X 2TB model to the 9100 Pro (Write) took just 3.9 seconds, and moving it back again (Read) was even faster, at 3.4 seconds. If you frequently move large files or folders between drives and want one that will do it exceptionally quickly, the 9100 Pro is among the fastest there is.
In real-world gaming benchmarks I saw equally impressive results. When running the Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail benchmark, we clocked a total loading time of just 6.2 seconds. All scenes loaded in under two seconds, and the first and fifth were well under a second a piece. That’s not much faster than a high-end PCIe 4 SSD, but it’s still plenty fast.
The only place where I found any kind of anomalous performance was in 3D Mark Storage. There I recorded a respectable, if unimpressive, 3,269 points, with an average access time around 55 micro-seconds.
Although I’m not the only one to have recorded a sub-4000 score with this particular drive on this particular benchmark, many contemporaries have managed 5-6,000+ scores. Iran it multiple times and it came back the same every time. I initially thought it might be the SLC running out, but I had similar performance throughout all the individual test runs during the benchmark.
I’ve reached out to Samsung for comment and will update this review if and when I hear back.
One area where this drive did really impress me, though, was temperature. Although the drive itself gets blisteringly hot to the point that touching it became a legitimate burn hazard, the controller inside was chilly the entire time. Even after sustained load during the 3D Mark test run, it didn’t even break 40 degrees.
That said, this drive is clearly putting out a lot of heat so I’d recommend the heatsink or some kind of strong active cooling.
]]>When I played Escape From Tarkov for the first time in 2018, I remember being captivated by its obtuse, insanely challenging structure. Like PUBG was to the battle royale genre, this promising prototype of what would go on to be called an extraction shooter had so many unique elements going for it, even if it was sometimes completely broken in its Early Access state. All these years later, now finally hitting 1.0, it’s pretty shocking how much has changed while it simultaneously remains exactly as exasperating as I remember it. The hands-off approach to onboarding that forces newcomers to beat their heads against its unforgiving mechanics for dozens of hours before claiming even a single victory captures the same relentless challenge I’ve always adored, while other frustrations, like its continued bugs, poor technical performance, and inability to address an abundance of cheaters, remains disappointingly worse than ever. After over 120 hours with the 1.0 version, there’s still something utterly compelling about the hyper-realistic combat simulation and never-ending loot treadmill it puts you on, but I can’t help but feel like this progenitor may have been left in the dust of the genre it spawned.
Escape From Tarkov isn’t just the original standalone extraction shooter, but also the one most fanatically adherent to the ruthless principles on which the genre was founded. Not only are you thrown into a deadly hellscape filled with lethal NPCs and merciless human opponents, you’re also given absolutely no guidance in your quest for loot as you fight to survive. Practically none of the progression systems are explained to you, there’s no map for you to look at while out in the field to indicate where you or the extraction points are, and you could easily spend tens of hours studying weapon attachments and ammo types just to understand how the heck to use the tools of death you’ll find on your journey.
In some ways, I really admire how unapologetic Tarkov is – its beautifully exacting game design, and the sense of discovery that takes place across hundreds of lessons learned the hard way can be incredibly rewarding. But then there are times where it’s all just so dang frustrating, like how atrociously the UI and menus are organized, as if they were designed specifically to offend you. Whether or not the payoff of finally feeling comfortable enough to bring your best equipment out and try for a proper extraction is worth it will ultimately depend on a couple things: your tolerance for pain, and your drive to master something designed to really test your expertise of systems Tarkov refuses to teach you.
I find myself somewhere in the middle, sometimes mesmerized by its impenetrable and challenging rough edges, while other times just downright disgusted by janky design decisions. For instance, I really got a kick out of figuring out various armor protection levels and corresponding ammo penetration ratings, even though it oftentimes proved to be a complete maze and came with an extremely harsh learning curve of figuring out why I died instantly in one raid but survived getting shot 20 times in the next. For me, this was unforgiving in all the right ways, and a noted lack of handholding is something I connect with much more than the growing number of games that annoyingly treat you like you’re stupid with ongoing tutorials. On the other hand, memorizing maps over the course of 10 hours apiece was less entertaining, specifically because this meant I frequently spent 20 minutes wandering around in search of an exit or a mission objective that was only described to me in the vaguest of terms. It seems like the community’s solution here is to use online tools to figure this stuff out, so it’s sorta baffling that they wouldn’t just integrate one of those directly.
So, with everything that frustrates me about Tarkov, what kept me playing for well over 100 hours, and what will likely keep me playing for hundreds more over the next year? Well, it’s the fact that once you put in the time to dig your way through all the layers of grime and obtuseness, you’ll find a pretty stellar extraction shooter that is quite hard to put down. Combat is an incredibly tense process of listening for rustling footsteps nearby and leaning out from behind cover to take precise shots, where a single bullet is all it could take to end another player’s run or put down a marauding NPC. Running around with your rifle’s flashlight blaring is an invitation for every enemy on the map to head in your direction with the aim of taking the gear from your corpse, and extracting with your loot is almost always accompanied by a deep sigh of relief.
NPC factions, including bosses, add a really interesting element of surprise and randomness to raids, too, where your best-laid plans go sideways when you run into an unexpected badass. They range from a psychopath chasing you around with a giant sledgehammer to a cowardly wimp surrounded by four heavily armed and armored guards. You might also find some other unexpected factions, like robed cultists creeping around in the woods with poisoned daggers, which is exactly as terrifying as it sounds the first time you encounter them. Discovering these things organically and either getting destroyed by or besting especially tough enemies to claim their loot kept me invested in exploring maps even when navigating them was sometimes an enormous pain.
When you’re not raiding, you’ll spend an almost equal amount of time with the tasks any extraction shooter worth its salt will have you doing: managing all that loot back at your hideout and using it to unlock cool stuff. The UI built around those activities is downright bad, and you’ll have to work to figure out some of the unintuitive systems that compose them, but the loot game is just about the best one out there once you do. It puts you on a beautiful treadmill that realistically takes thousands of hours to properly complete. That rewarding sense of forward momentum isn’t always there, as you’ll spend lots of time just grinding for cash by selling everything you find out on raids to vendors and stuffing your pockets with an absolutely obscene amount of nails and screw nuts to craft items you need back at your base. But it’s hard to argue that developer Battlestate Games hasn’t created one of the longest, most consistently enjoyable progression systems out there.
The upgrades in question range from facilities in your hideout that let you do things like restore your damage taken from previous raids faster, store more loot in your stash, or test out your weapons at a firing range, almost all of which are genuinely worth the effort to unlock (though many of those demand a whole helluva lot of resources in order to do so). You’ll also have an absolutely enormous list of story missions and side quests to complete, special items to unlock from vendors by exchanging rare materials, and more. Missions run the gamut of killing a certain amount of enemy combatants or looting specific items while out on raids, to more involved, plot-focused stuff like a side quest where I set up camcorders all over a warehouse to record myself killing people, presumably to then cut into a sick highlights reel. Sure, actually chatting with each of the vendors, who only speak Russian and have little in the way of personalities, is a waste of time that only highlights how not great the story is, but in a game about loot and long-term progression goals, Tarkov absolutely nails that bit, with a truly brilliant, Sisyphean grind.
Although most runs are quite stressful and require you to put all the gear you’re carrying on the line, one nice element of Tarkov is the ability to do "SCAV Runs" where you play as a street rat that uses a random set of borrowed equipment. In these low stakes runs, you have a whole lot to gain from taking out a rival player or geared-up NPC and basically nothing to lose from dying yourself, which provides a great opportunity for a come-up that’s especially helpful after your latest devastating loss. Plus, it puts you on the same team as other SCAVs, and pitting a group of poorly geared plebs against those with better equipment is an entertaining twist on the extraction formula in its own right. I tried to do SCAV runs in between each proper deployment and found them to be a pretty great cooldown option after each sweaty raid.
One of the upsides of bothering to learn each of Tarkov’s 11 maps is that they’re all actually quite diverse and are filled with unique takes on the extraction format. On one map, I fought my way through military bases and bunkers and had to stand my ground while a massive armored train arrived to spirit me and my loot away, while on another I wandered through the woods and the wreckage of a crashed airplane while constantly looking to the horizon for snipers due to a distinct lack of cover. Another level requires keycards to enter and is filled with incredibly good loot, but also has equally formidable foes stalking the halls, while another still is just a massive shopping mall filled with stores waiting to be looted. Learning the ins and outs of these levels can be a bit painful at the outset, especially since some things are quite annoyingly unclear, like how the boundaries of most maps are never explained and lethally enforced. For example, in one level you’ll get sniped by unseen enemies without warning if you walk beyond the ill-defined borders, and in another you’ll get immediately blown to pieces due to the edges of the level being a literal mine field.
Unfortunately, Tarkov’s intentionally punishing design is marred by completely unintentional issues that have made this full launch much harder to enjoy. At least in these first couple of weeks with 1.0, there are still numerous bugs I would’ve hoped to have been cleaned up after so many years in Early Access, like characters getting caught on objects or clipping through walls, desync and rubber-banding that monkeys with hit registration, loot that’s visible but painfully lodged in the environment so it can’t be picked up, and numerous issues with the already ugly-as-sin menus that make navigating them even more frustrating.
Even more alarming is the continued prevalence of cheaters, who continue to plague the PvP servers so they can sell their ill-gotten items back to the people they’ve ripped off via an in-game trading market. It’s all the usual stuff like wallhacks, aimbots, and moving at faster-then-normal speeds, but in a game where all your loot is on the line, not doing a better job to mitigate this kind of stuff is pretty hard to swallow. In fact, it was such an issue in my first 10 hours that I decided to spend the vast majority of my time for this review just focusing on Tarkov’s PvE mode for my sanity’s sake, which removes other players entirely aside from those you bring with you. For a sweaty PvP tryhard like myself, forsaking the competitive mode goes against every instinct I have, but with the exploitable state of the PvP servers as they are, it was definitely the right choice.
There’s also the matter of just how bad this thing looks and performs by the standards of the day. I remember thinking Tarkov already didn’t look great when I last revisited it a few years ago, and coming back to it again in 2025 has not done it any favors. Objects in the environment are blurry and low res, and (with the exception of the vendors you’ll chat with as you complete quests) human faces look like they were modeled using the monster-generator that is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s character creator. And although the servers have never exactly been speedy, it’s still pretty shocking that it took me about five minutes of loading every time I wanted to enter into a match, during which time my menu was locked up so I couldn’t even fiddle with my inventory or engage in stash organizing busywork while waiting.
Even if you can look past a lot of the jankiness, which I generally can, you still might be infuriated by the current monetization model. Now, normally cost has no actual impact on the quality of a game’s content, but Tarkov is a bit of an exception in that its uber-premium packages come with straight up pay-to-win perks that are just about as nasty as can be. Over the course of the past two weeks, I progressively purchased all four of Tarkov’s escalating packages in order to try them out firsthand, which range from the standard 50ドル up to a whopping 250,ドル and each one offers more appallingly game-changing boons than the last.
The benefits granted are incredibly powerful boosts that give you quite an advantage. You can get an exclusive safety pouch that’s up to 50% larger, allowing you to keep more of your valuable items upon death. Certain hideout upgrades that offer huge benefits can be unlocked automatically, like a massive amount of additional storage space that normally costs millions of in-game dollars and rare materials to acquire. Most outrageous of all, though, are the boosts to vendor reputations that would otherwise take dozens upon dozens of hours to earn, which are a pathway to purchasing better gear that gives you a huge leg up on progression. It’s so insane and shameless that I honestly felt bad playing alongside my friends who had the standard edition.
Escape From Tarkov also has a purely PvP mode, called Arena, where you go toe-to-toe with rival players in claustrophobic stages, but I can’t really recommend it. Many of Escape From Tarkov’s interesting combat mechanics, like sparse ammo and the need to heal injuries by using a variety of medical equipment on the affected area, just don’t really work in a purely fast-paced arena FPS. Plus, I only spent a small amount of time playing this mode, but in this time I encountered some of the most toxic ghouls I’ve met online in any game. A typical match involves teammates with slurs for usernames threatening you to perform well in the lobby, before screaming at you and quitting the match after a single round. Some of Escape From Tarkov’s quests will point you toward this mode and playing matches can reward loot that you can bring back to the main game, but even so, I don’t suggest spending time here.
]]>Whether it be games, films, paintings, or any other form of creative endeavor, art has long been a vehicle for transgression and subversion, providing curious observers an avenue to ruminate on uncomfortable, often taboo aspects of society. Take David Lynch’s surreal horror epic Lost Highway, or Half Mermaid’s mesmerising puzzle mystery Immortality – their uncompromising and dark ambience leaves you changed, and often with more questions than answers. Horses, the latest game from developer Santa Ragione, uses the medium to tell its own morally challenging story, asking you to complete increasingly distressing tasks as a naive farmhand. Guaranteed to make you uncomfortable, Horses is an affecting first-person horror game that, despite a few pacing and signposting issues, tells a story that is sure to stick with you, whether you want it to or not.
Before we get too deep, it’s worth mentioning that Santa Ragione does provide a lengthy content warning before you begin playing due to its heavy subject matter. It details the themes you’ll encounter, which include gory imagery, psychological abuse, and suicide. That warning goes on to explain that you will also likely take part in activities that are oppositional to your own moral beliefs. How you feel about what Horses asks of you is ultimately very personal. Still, I was pleased to see the developers clearly outline what’s ahead for those who may struggle with certain moments, as I did — you should take this warning seriously.
You step into the boots of Anselmo, a troubled 20-year-old who's been shipped away from college to work on a rural farm for two weeks at the behest of his parents. It becomes immediately apparent that something is wrong here, though, as you meet the titular horses, who are in fact naked humans with horse masks permanently affixed on their heads. From this point forward, almost every action you complete, from simple farming tasks to tormenting veterinarian work, is intentionally intended to make you feel conflicted as Horses forces you to participate in the farmer’s sick power fantasy. Over approximately three hours, I was compelled and constantly curious, but still found myself struggling to push through the haunting world Santa Ragione has conjured, with its grey moral code and disturbing paraphernalia.
Horses is, in effect, an interactive silent film, with unsettling lines of dialogue delivered through old-timey title cards amongst a smattering of live-action and 3D animated sequences with limited first-person interactions between them. Every scene plays out in black and white, and you’ll be held captive staring at the farmer’s mouth as it enunciates monologues through vile grins, spliced with real-world footage of vegetables being watered (as well as other, far more troubling visuals I wouldn’t want to spoil here). A minimal soundscape adds to the off-putting atmosphere, buffeted by the constant whirring of film that taunts you at all times, ensuring you feel isolated as you endure the weeks of work. This blend of audiovisual torment is unnerving from the start, and only escalates as you catapult closer to the striking finale.
At the dawn of each day, you’re provided a list of tasks to complete, like feeding the dog, chopping firewood, and cleaning the stables of the horses. The jobs are seldom as simple as they seem on paper, and often lead to confronting scenes that gradually illuminate the farmer's goals, and how the horses came to be his "property." Your inventory is limited, and you can only handle two items at a time. As such, you’ll often find yourself running back and forth across the small map, between pens, the tool shed, and the house. As much as it is an open space, the threatening elements within it are constantly shifting and smartly toying with your expectations. NPCs like the farmer’s dog, Fido – another subjugated human in a mask – can and will move around the space, complicating your jobs, and often giving you a fright.
Avoiding too many specifics, at one point I was responsible for finding horses that had gotten loose and returning them to their cramped stall unharmed. The search eventually led me out the front gates, where I witnessed a confronting interaction between a horse outside the gates and one still trapped inside. Such unusual moments ramp up in intensity over the course of Horses' runtime, effectively reinforcing the starkness of the world around their nightmarish, hay-filled isolation.
Across the summer, you’ll meet a handful of curiously animated locals who are complicit with the farmer's actions, including a veterinarian, a wealthy businessman, his daughter, and a knowing priest. While there isn’t a ton of dialogue to cycle through in these short interactions, the unnerving writing and sinister characterisation of each citizen increased my sense of dread as it became clear that your freedom, in life or on the farm, isn’t a guarantee. As the inevitability of my new reality came into focus and the trepidation set in, I found myself questioning the farmers' treatment not just of the ‘animals’ or the outsiders, but of me. What misstep could I make that would land me in his prison? This is the central qualm you’ll ponder during and after your time with Horses.
The horror doesn’t end with the working day, of course, and occasionally, when the sun sets, Anselmo slips into a dreamlike state where reality bleeds into their imagination. In these moments, the spectre of the farmer and his sexual and religious trauma manifests through dark allegories that you experience in a raw, challenging, and uncensored format. Instead of relying on text dumps, Horses’ penchant for sharp dialogue and symbolic iconography gives the player room to unpack its singular, heavy story.
It’s a shame, then, that with such a strong concept, there are a handful of comparatively mundane signposting issues throughout that can muddle the pacing, leaving you to pixel hunt for the right piece of equipment or overthink simple puzzles when you could have been contemplating one of Horses’ many jarring visual metaphors. For example, one day I simply needed to feed the horses – but despite meeting the basic requirements, nothing changed, and I was unable to prompt the farmer to provide further information. With no clear next step, I searched the area until I happened to find a specific item I didn’t know I needed to progress. In a game that feels so intentional and curated, such moments kill the ambience, and it feels awkward to wander around aimlessly in this psychologically punishing environment, especially when you’ve been imbued with the impetus to solve its mysteries.
Like a pile of sugar cubes, Horses often has you in the palm of its hand, but unlike other, more cohesively arresting horror games like Mouthwashing or No, I’m Not A Human, Santa Ragione’s attempt struggles to keep you there. The low-stakes gameplay feels like the culprit here, as there’s not much to chew on if you’re not gripped by the unfolding story and its characters. A short runtime only magnifies these limitations, messing with the cadence of an otherwise well-orchestrated experience.
]]>Depending on who you talk to, beat ‘em ups are either repetitive, button-mashy coin munchers or a deceptively simple vehicle for absolute combat mastery. Me? I’m in the latter camp. But how do you get people who aren’t sickos like myself interested? How do you lure them into taking the first steps down Sicko Road? This year’s Absolum tried by merging a mechanically excellent beat ‘em up with a middling roguelite. Marvel Cosmic Invasion developer Tribute Games – the cats behind Shredder’s Revenge, the best TMNT game since Turtles in Time– takes a different approach. It looks to the Marvel vs. Capcom fighting games of old and asks one of the boldest questions I’ve seen a beat ‘em up pose in a New York minute: what if it was a tag game where you controlled multiple heroes? The answer, as it turns it, rules, even if the actual execution of Cosmic Invasion doesn’t quite live up to that concept.
I’ll be real with y’all; I’m not a Marvel guy. My dad’s into comics, and he got me into them, but DC was always his bag (he owns every Wonder Woman comic ever published, and no, that’s not an exaggeration), so I’m a DC kid at heart with a soft spot for indie comics. But I love the weirder parts of Marvel, especially the million conflicting X-men timelines and the cosmic stuff. It’s not the most popular thing Marvel publishes (that is and always will be Spider-Man, though X-men is no slouch), but it’s the most interesting. Give me that over the MCU stuff any day.
If the title didn’t give it away, that’s what Marvel Cosmic Invasion is about. The story here is real simple, almost like it has been ripped straight from the pages of a multi-issue event series. Big Bad Annihilus’s Annihilation Wave (listen, it’s comic books, okay?) is sweeping the galaxy! All life hangs in the balance! So it’s up to a rag-tag assortment of Marvel heroes, whether Earthborn or cosmic in origin, to bring him down. That’s all you gotta know. And you know what? It works.
A lot of it comes down to the team of 15 heroes that Tribute Games has assembled. Yeah, you’ve got the icons, the regulars who absolutely, positively accept-no-substitutes gotta be there. You know the ones: Storm, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Captain America. Then you’ve got cats that were B-listers before the movies elevated them to prominence: Black Panther, Iron Man, Rocket Raccoon, She-Hulk, Nova, Phoenix, Venom. And then there are the weird and wacky inclusions. Thor isn’t here; instead, you get Beta Ray Bill. Real ones know. How do you feel about Cosmic Ghost Rider? Then there’s my girl Phyla-Vell. Oh, and because this is cosmic Marvel, the Silver Surfer is also here, and he is caked up. To the Silver Surfer degenerate at Tribute Games: I see you, and I appreciate you.
But the reality is that everyone here looks stunning because the pixel art spritework is absolutely gorgeous. Whether it’s Phyla-Vell’s hair blowing gently in the wind, how Wolverine always looks like a coiled spring, or the subtle transformations that sometimes reveal Eddie Brock beneath the symbiote as Venom, Cosmic Invasion captures the essence of these characters, right down to their voices. Go ahead and watch one the videos on this page, tell me that doesn’t sound exactly like the way Wolverine or Storm or Iron Man sound in your head. True believers, the vibe is immaculate.
Structurally, Cosmic Invasion is a pretty standard beat ‘em up. Not counting the tutorial, there are 15 stages, including old Marvel standbys like New York City, Wakanda, the Savage Land, and Genosha, as well as more exotic environs like Fort Galactus, each with a fun little sub-description (Genosha’s is Heavy Metal; the Savage Land’s is Rumble in the Jungle). Stage selection is mostly a straight line, but occasionally the path will split before reconverging and you’ll have to complete both branches before moving on.
Levels themselves are good but unremarkable beat ‘em up fare with the occasional environmental hazard. There is a collectible to find to liven things up, as well as three challenges in each stage – two are hero specific, such as defeating a certain number of enemies with a certain character’s special attack, while the final one is related to the stage itself. All of this is good: the challenges encourage you to use new characters and learn the intricacies of each arena, and stages are well-designed, snappy (each one takes around 10-15 minutes), and visually distinct in cool ways – you’d never mistake Savage Lands for Klyntar or Genosha – but nothing here is going to redefine your expectations for what a beat ‘em up can be.
What makes Cosmic Invasion special is its characters. Up to four people can play Cosmic Invasion at once, each controlling two characters, and it’s impressive how different each character is, even if they might not feel that way at first. Take Nova and Iron Man; sure, both of their unique attacks are ranged energy blasts, but Nova’s can pass through and hit multiple targets at once. Iron Man’s don’t. Nova’s special attack is an energy field that only hits foes at close range, while Iron Man’s giant, Marvel vs. Capcom 2-esque laser can hit anyone standing anywhere on-screen, but it does require you to line up your enemies and aim well.
Meanwhile, Rocket is a ranged powerhouse, but his charged heavy attack does massive damage, while Phyla-Vell’s, who is more melee focused, can stun – and no one else has anything like her sword, which she can throw and then teleport to in order to start combos and then keep them going across the screen. Beta Ray Bill and Cap can both throw their weapons, too, but Cap’s shield returns to him automatically; Bill’s will spin in place, potentially juggling anyone unlucky enough to come into contact with it until you manually call it back. Even She-Hulk and Wolverine, both up-close-and-personal bruisers, play differently. Logan is faster and all about chaining long stabby-stab combos together, while Jen is a powerhouse who focuses on short combos that launch her victims into the air for potential follow-ups. They both have grabs, but they operate in very different ways.
Some characters have dodges, while others can block and parry if they time things right, opening up more defensive options. Characters that fly have a much easier time dealing with winged foes than those who don’t, and it’s easier for them to avoid stampedes. Everyone is a little different, and that can have a massive impact on how they play.
What’s really cool, though, are the tag team elements. You only actively control one character at a time, and you can summon your tag partner for various assists to keep laying on the hurt, opening up cool new offensive possibilities – that could be a launcher, a standard combo, their unique ability, their metered "I want these guys dead" special attack, and so on. Figuring out the best combinations and how movesets interact is a lot of fun, especially since you don’t start with everyone unlocked. It’s possible to lose a character mid-level (they have separate health bars), but even then, all isn’t lost. You continue on with your remaining hero, and if you stumble upon some floor food, a time-honored beat ‘em up tradition, they’ll come back with a little health.
Characters also level up as you use them, gaining more health, passive abilities, and so on, encouraging you to experiment, especially in co-op. I played the whole game with my wife (a single run through the campaign took three hours), and while I think Cosmic Invasion is a good time solo, like basically every beat ‘em up, it’s better with friends.
If this beat ‘em up has any black eyes, it’s the lack of enemy variety. You’ll see the same core cast of baddies a lot in Cosmic Invasion, and while that’s not a huge problem (this happens in most beat ‘em ups), it can get a little old. It’s also hilariously obvious when you’re fighting a boss that will become a playable character later on because it feels like you’re fighting someone you’ll be able to play later. It can lead to some really funny moments, like when we were fighting the Silver Surfer on an elevator and kept knocking him into the abyss. Eventually, he’d levitate back up to us for more, only to get knocked down again. It wasn’t bad, but it was as goofy as Rob Liefeld-drawn feet or pouches.
If you get bored of beating on Annihilus’s minions, you can head to the Vault, where you can see each hero’s progress in the Hero Lab, learn about their history and the history of your foes in the Nova Corps Files, and listen to some of Cosmic Invasion’s excellent tracks. You can also spend Cosmic Cubes you earn to unlock nodes in the Cosmic Matrix for more color palettes, hero profiles, tunes, and Nova Corps Files. It’s a cool little system, and it even doubles as a neat way to make art if you unlock the right nodes in a way that forms a pattern. I made an adorable little bug, and I’ll miss him when I fill everything out and he’s gone.
]]>I’m parked at the back of the grid on Mount Panorama, awaiting the race start, and there are cars ahead of me literally facing backwards. This is not going to go well. As you’d expect, pandemonium ensues when the lights go off. The race has just begun and it’s already a mess.
Unfortunately, this is Project Motor Racing in a nutshell right now.
On paper, Project Motor Racing is precisely the sort of racing game I want to play. It has a great selection of cars, a number of which are thoroughly underrepresented in modern racers. It’s also not crippled with free-to-play chicanery or subject to a monthly subscription, and its focus isn’t primarily multiplayer. All of this is high-octane music to my ears. In practice, however, Project Motor Racing simply hasn’t worked out, and I’ve totally bounced off it in its current state thanks to AI that essentially ignores your presence on track, a hopelessly uneven penalty system that serves only to frustrate and ruin your races, and its array of bugs and peculiar physics quirks.
Project Motor Racing arrives as a spiritual successor to Slightly Mad Studios’ now-defunct Project CARS series, which failed to survive the Codemasters acquisition of Slightly Mad (and the subsequent EA purchase of Codemasters). There may be some different logos on the loading screen, sure, but developer Straight4 Studios is basically a rebirthed Slightly Mad after someone hit the VIN with an angle grinder.
Perhaps more specifically, it’s attempting to pick up where Project CARS 2 left off – brushing aside the bafflingly casual reinvention of the series in Project CARS 3. If you need a comparison to chew on, it’s a little like how Jaws 4 ignores the events of Jaws 3D. Unfortunately, just like Jaws 4, things get real fishy, real fast.
To be fair, Project Motor Racing’s single-player set up has a good base and I do like how malleable it initially is, with three starting budget figures that give us the flexibility to approach the career mode however we choose. That is, you can select to begin with just enough cash to scrape into the entry-level categories, or a wallet big enough to buy any car on offer and head straight to the top classes. It’s smart that it has these options. There are actually slots to have three separate careers on the go simultaneously, so it’s possible to experiment with multiple approaches (or, in my instance, for my sons to dabble with their own career saves without messing around with mine – an underrated addition to any racing game).
Your in-game payouts can also be tweaked to fit your playstyle. For instance, you can opt to keep things simple and take a flat payout per event, or you can mix it up and take bonuses for winning only – or even have your damage repair bills covered in return for a steady portion of your event takings. This is an equally smart way of slinging out credits to us, regardless of how differently you or I may plan to go about our racing.
The management component plateaus here, though, since there are no other meaningful aspects to it. There’s no in-game way of creating a custom team appearance for the cars you buy and race, or applying sponsor logos. In this regard, don’t expect anything like, say, the recently released NASCAR 25. Support for mods is a much-touted feature of Project Motor Racing on both PC and console – and I have no doubt that many recognisable liveries will be convincingly recreated and available via user-created mods – but mods feel unlikely to fill this specific gap.
Once you have a team and a car, the campaign mode becomes a simple matter of selecting a championship or event, paying the entry fee, and competing. At this point, the overall objective is really that of any real-life race driver – spend your work days at high speed on 18 world-famous race tracks and do your best to win (or, failing that, not send your team bankrupt). This approach works for me. Or, at least, it would have, if Project Motor Racing had not been so bafflingly irritating to race in.
The racing is frustratingly close to being entirely decent, but it’s currently completely undermined by its aggressively oblivious AI and its brazenly unfair penalty system – both of which are so annoying I have no desire to keep playing at the moment.
The big problem with the AI is that they regularly drive like you’re not on track. I’m not just talking about them coming across on you when you only have a slight overlap and probably got optimistic sticking your nose there in the first place (although they will do that, and watching the replays exposes that they’ll do so by sometimes clipping through your front end like you’re a ghost). I’m talking about the absolute argy-bargey that occurs when you’re right alongside them and they want to carry on sticking to the racing line like freight trains, so they thump into you with zero regard for your existence. It certainly doesn’t help that it currently features no radar or proximity indicators for the cars around you, and no spotter either.
On PS5, the single-player opponent count is actually limited to just 15 (crossplay multiplayer allows up to 32). Frankly, 15 isn’t near enough for a racing sim of this type but, considering the way they drive, I guess I don’t know that I’d want any more of these lunatics out there right now.
Let’s be clear, my favourite real-world racing categories are old school Super Touring and V8 Supercars, so I am unequivocally all for elbows-out, panel-punishing racing in my games, too – but this just takes the piss. Project Motor Racing’s AI regularly reminds me more of classic Gran Turismo, where the AI racers always felt exponentially heavier and generally incapable of being affected by the player’s car. To experiment, I’ve cannoned into the back of opponents for no result. They just carry on cornering without losing a position, while I’m parked in the gravel.
The issue is compounded by a ruinously strict track limit penalty system that will just nuke your whole race for zero reason. Get bumped off track by the AI? That’ll be a two-second penalty for breaching track limits. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t your fault, and it doesn’t matter that you’ll have already likely lost time because of it. If you have the opponent strength slider set at just the right level to have your times toe-to-toe with the AI, two seconds can be a lifetime. It just immediately ruins races. It’s a real buzzkill to be in the groove, lapping consistently with the pack a bit spread out, and thinking, "You know what? This actually feels pretty good right now" – then, bam; tiny moment, dud penalty.
For comparison, Assetto Corsa Competizione also dishes out penalties, but only if it detects an advantage. If you’re forced off track – or if your ego writes a cheque your tyres can’t cash and you grab a bit of impromptu dirt on a corner exit – ACC won’t penalise you if you didn’t benefit from the off-track excursion. Project Motor Racing is the exact opposite, whacking you with penalties for tiny mistakes that have already cost you time. Hell, they don’t even have to be tiny; you can spin, get overtaken by the whole field, and still be slapped with a two-second penalty the moment you rejoin. I wasn’t cheating; I was crashing. Confusingly, I had better luck actually cheating, because the penalty system allowed me to blast straight ahead at T1 on Project Motor Racing’s off-brand version of Monza, pay my dues by slowing to 60km/h, and immediately go from 16th to 1st. This is repeatable, too – and sometimes I actually didn’t get penalised at all.
At any rate, it’s thanks to the penalty system I certainly have no interest playing the career on "authentic" difficulty, which locks the opponent strength at 100 and does not allow race restarts. This might be a problem if trophies are important to you, because a horde of them are tied up behind completing the career on "authentic". Authentic mode is optional, but Project Motor Racing would do well to remember we’re not all as quick as real racing drivers when we play video games. That’s why I play video games. For now, any time I get pinged unfairly in my current career I typically just hit the pause menu and try again. I just need to hope that everyone is facing the right way when we restart.
Project Motor Racing’s weaknesses on track are annoying considering how much I like its current garage, and doubly so considering how excited I was to learn that Australian touring cars from two separate eras of the Supercars series are planned to arrive as DLC later next year.
Project Motor Racing features over 70 cars, and I admire the distilled approach of focusing strictly on racing models. Ferrari and McLaren appear to have turned down a seat at the table for now – which does create some hefty holes in the categories it focuses on – but it’s particularly neat to see some of the old GT and N-GT cars that rarely get much love in contemporary racing games. For instance, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Lister Storm and its 7.0l V12. After all, there ain’t no replacement for displacement.
The cars look nice in the menu screens, but they’re not as glamorous out on track. In action, it’s actually quite washed out, and it absolutely does not look a generation newer than the excellent Project CARS 2. Damage is underwhelming, as is the rain. There are a lot of layers to the sound, which does capture a good deal of the raw, mechanical noises of a race car – although broadly speaking there’s room for improvement, and I’d love the engine notes to be a little thicker and throatier.
In terms of how the cars handle, however, I’m tugged in two directions – literally, in this instance. There’s really nothing more important to a race sim than the handling, and I have to say there are some car and track combos in Project Motor Racing where I’ve felt very satisfied with the overall feel on a wheel (the only PlayStation wheel I have is the Thrustmaster T-GT II, which isn’t a direct-drive wheel, but is about as good as belt-driven wheels get in terms of force feedback).
For instance, in a GT3 car like the Audi R8 or the Ford Mustang at Mount Panorama, I can lap clean and the cars feel compliant beneath me. Am I as quick as a real GT3 driver? Not at all, and I’m probably underdriving the cars by some margin – but it does all feel quite intuitive to me at the speed I race. The buzz from kerbs is strong, and the sensation of weight fluctuating is impressively pronounced – like everything lightening up for a beat as you barrel over a crest and your car becoming heavier and stickier as you scoot from the end of a slope. This is a big factor on a track with such profound elevation changes, like Bathurst. The disparity in performance on a cold tyre versus a warm tyre is also huge in Project Motor Racing, and the very real necessity to drive the first lap or so more delicately is also a satisfying enough challenge here.
I’ve been far less confident in other cars, however. The hypercars are the worst culprits. They just want me dead. Obviously I’m not a professional racing driver, and I’m not going to speak to you like I am – or act like I know exactly what’s going on beneath the surface of something like Project Motor Racing when it comes to simulating a Le Mans prototype. The hypercars, however, are undriveable out of the box – even on a wheel. They pull left and right, they slip, slide, and scrub – and there’s just zero feeling of the immense downforce I expected. For clarity, we’re talking about cars that produce four times as much downforce as they do drag.
Unfortunately, on gamepad, the news is worse. It’s just way too twitchy to be a satisfying sim on a standard controller – especially when the tiniest erroneous flick of a stick can mean a nonsense penalty. I tried dialling down the sensitivity of the steering, but it really had little effect. Cars (especially the prototypes) get so unsettled when steering from left to right on a gamepad I just can’t really recommend picking up Project Motor Racing if that’s exclusively the way you plan to play it.
]]>Ladies, gentlemen, beloved they/thems, the Zombie-curious, wretched undead, at last, my watch is over (mostly). After two weeks of ups and downs with Call of Duty Black: Ops 7’s Zombies mode, my feelings are mixed. I think this version has all things that make Zombies good – a cleverly designed quest line, a cool map, the joy and despondence of the Mystery Box and Call of Duty’s consistently fun gunplay. But those returning strengths don’t shine this year in the way they usually do, with an Easter Egg hunt that’s too big, too time-consuming, and too unwieldy to wholeheartedly recommend. It’s not bad, per se, but it can be frustrating in a way that might make you bow out early. And that’s lousy.
First, I come with a confession, one that serves as the foundation for the thesis of this review: my squad and I, brave souls who conquered Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode last year, and several others before, have not beaten Black Ops 7's signature Ashes of the Damned map at the time of this writing. Instead, the attempt fractured our group, perhaps permanently. One member threw up his hands and simply walked away after a particularly devastating loss, leaving us down a man and his not-insubstantial institutional knowledge and skill. Another was temporarily banned from our Discord after our last, best run. We were so close, friends. So tantalizingly close. And we came up short.
"Well, Will," you might reasonably ask, "why issue a review if you haven’t finished it?" A few reasons, dear reader. First, we always try to learn the map and discover the process for ourselves, because that is how the average person will do it; second, because our failure mirrors what I feel many other teams will experience playing Ashes of the Damned, making it a crucial part of both this year’s game and this review; and third, because I have seen damn near everything the mode has to offer except the finale itself, and I already have a good idea of what Ashes of the Damned is: a very good map that can be exceptionally frustrating, especially if you use matchmaking to team up with random players, that often doesn’t work as it should.
Before we get started, allow me a chance to tee off on Black Ops 7’s PC anti-cheat system. This is Call of Duty. We will not be playing this game in a year because there will be a new one, and requiring me to flash a new BIOS to my computer and then go into my BIOS so I can flip the right switches until the Powers That Be decide I can play Call of Duty is ridiculous, even if this anti-cheat requirement remains in next year’s game, as Activision claims it will. You will never create an anti-cheat so good that it can’t be beaten, and whatever is gained from requiring all this is likely not worth it, nor the access it requires you give Activision to your computer. It is ludicrous, frankly, and the battle is unwinnable. If you create a better shield, the other guys will simply craft a better spear. Okay, rant over. Back to Zombies.
There is allegedly a story here – your characters are dropped somewhere into the Dark Aether where they run into a guy called the Warden who looks like the sexy ghoul from the Fallout TV series. After transmogrifying you into the semi-living by having a weird skull in a birdcage sap some of your life essence away like he’s the six-fingered man from The Princess Bride, you’re dropped into Ashes of the Damned and left to figure out what the hell is going on. All of it is very well-produced and so goofy that the only thing I could do was watch the introductory cutscene while emulating the face that I imagine a cow would make if you gave it cocaine, chuckle a little, and get on with it. Yeah, choosing certain characters gives you more story dialogue, but there’s nothing crazy here unless you’re already far too invested in Zombie lore. If that’s your bag, Godspeed. I’m here to shoot stuff.
Many of the pain points from last year remain early on – for instance, you can’t make your loadout until you hit level four, which means if Zombies is all you want to do in Black Ops 7 (and for me, it is), you’re stuck with a pistol and whatever you can earn by buying stuff on the walls after you’ve dispatched enough undead. Remember when games just let you have fun from the outset instead of unlocking it?
Otherwise, the underpinnings of Zombies feel much the same. You’re on a map, you open up new doors and paths with currency you earn, and you’ve got Pack-a-Punch machines to upgrade your guns. There’s additional armor you can apply plastered to the walls, an Arsenal to really crank up specific aspects of your weapons, Gobblegums for a little flavor if your mouth is lonely and you want a mid-battle pick-me-up that can make your run easier, and so on. And of course, while you’re managing all of this, the undead rise and hunger for flesh. Ghouls, man.
The gameplay here is similar to last year’s – I still love sliding at a group of zombies and firing off a shotgun until they’re just paste and all that. No, what’s new are the maps. Vandorn Farm is there for your classic, round-based survival attempts on a smaller map, Dead Ops Arcade for something a bit more ridiculous, and Cursed for the ultra hardcore (there’s no guidance here, loadouts and your HUD are limited, and you can equip Relics for additional difficulty). But the seven-course dinner of it all is Ashes of the Damned, the Easter Egg-heavy, "how does anyone figure any of this out?" gauntlet that you’ll have to clear if you really want to say you’ve beaten this year’s iteration. Ashes of the Damned is utterly massive, a monstrous figure eight with several different sub-sections (including Vandorn Farm) that, in years past, might have stood alone as a single map. Now they’re all connected by roads you’ll travel in a truck called Ol’ Tessie.
I love Ol’ Tessie. You can stand on the roof and lean out her windows, and if she takes too much damage, she’ll explode and you’ll have to repair her. She’s your way to and from places without dying (short of the jump pads you can activate), but early on she also becomes your Pack-A-Punch machine (which juices any gun you use it on, essential for the tougher zombies of later rounds), so something as simple as where you park her becomes a lot more important because you might need that boon or to get going in a hurry. You can also slot her with a turbo booster and three monster heads that shoot lightning. Tessie forever.
A lot of our runs began the same way: get Tessie outfitted, pray to pull the Ray Gun at the randomized Mystery Box (we had a shockingly good track record here; my friend Thomas kept pulling one on on his first or second try, and I am baffled by his power), and then start doing the rest of the Easter Eggs. Part of this becomes something you can brute force – you can use certain extremely rare Gobblegums to make it spawn a Ray Gun or the map’s Wonder Weapon – but it’s kind of essential for your long-term survival. Doing the map right means doing it quickly, before the round count gets too high and the Zombies get too strong, and there’s a fun sense of progression that comes with that. Not in a "yay, we’re getting more/better stuff" sense, although that is true, but in a "look at us mastering this" sense that I appreciate, especially since so many games now are about making your numbers go up and not actually improving as a player.
All the wacky Zombies stuff is still here. At one point, you have to throw an axe at the foot of a zombie hanging from a barn and then use a molotov cocktail to turn the severed foot into bones you can use for something else. At another point, you’re killing zombies inside of an old diner until one of them drops a key to the refrigerator in the back carrying a pretty grotesque surprise. It’s goofy and fun and I don’t know how anybody solves this stuff through anything other than trial and error, much less how the dev team comes up with it every year.
This is what makes Zombies so hard. Not only do you have to figure out all these steps, but you have to do them in order and remember where everything is on the map, and do all of it without your team dying. A full Zombies clear will take you several hours, and if you screw up and your whole team buys the farm late in that process, you’ll need to restart from scratch. You will lose every Gobblegum you spent, every weapon you jacked up with a Pack-A-Punch, every Perk you guzzled from a soda machine. Do everything you just did all over again.
It can be demoralizing, but I don’t actually mind this stuff. I’m a fighting game sicko, an action game degenerate, a beat ‘em up guy. I play in a competitive Madden league. I like learning the ins and outs of a system, mastering it, and watching what felt impossible become routine. That is one of the joys of playing games for me. But one of the crucial things you have to understand is that my Zombies group has never been made up of other game critics. It’s regular guys with nine-to-fives in fields like accounting and medicine and law and IT who play games only for fun. It’s always been something I’ve felt is necessary to review something like this: playing it with regular people. And this year, it was too much for some of them.
Part of that is how big Ashes of the Damned is. It’s a well-designed, varied map with a ton of different environments, but its sheer size means it can take a minute to get from Point A to Point B, even with Ol’ Tessie or a jump pad, and you’ll have to go all over Creation to finish it. The other issue is the number of steps involved to get things done. It’s a lot to remember! A lot to figure out! A lot to execute! And you’re expected to do it all in one run without all of you dying.
Even the rare Gobblegums that feel necessary for a good run are limited with the 250ドル Vault Edition, which was the version of Black Ops 7 we were provided by Activision for review. Using one of the rare ones that essentially makes the Mystery Box spawn a Ray Gun or loads you up with every perk at once and then failing on a run feels bad because you’ve lost a limited resource with little to show for it aside from whatever progress you’ve made in learning the map and whatever experience you gain for meta progression. Naturally, you can buy Gobblegum packs for real money, because of course, right? But the whole thing feels exploitative, like it’s hard because it wants you to give in and open your wallet and just buy the stuff that will make it easier.
And that’s assuming the map works properly. At one point, you have to use stun grenades to wake up a robot named Klaus. He’ll join up with you afterwards, and you can command him to interact with a computer that will then trigger a retinal scan that someone in your group has to stare at until a meter fills up. The problem is you’re being attacked by zombies the whole time. If everything’s working right, you can just have someone do that while the rest of the crew defends them. But we ran into an issue where Klaus simply wouldn’t activate the control panel no matter how many times we commanded him to. Instead, he’d stand dumbly in front of it like "Well, what do you want me to do?" while we fought off zombies before peacing out, requiring we spend valuable currency to bring him back. That time, he did activate it, but no matter how hard I stared at the retina scanner, the little bar wouldn’t go up. Needless to say, we died.
And that’s the thing, right? You’re going to die. You’re going to die because someone forgot to get an item you needed and you weren’t high enough level to craft it at the bench (this, for the record, is extremely dumb; just let me make a throwing axe! Yes, you can find one on the map if you know where to look; that isn’t the point); because OI’ Tessie took a bunch of damage and exploded, stranding you in the No Man’s Land between proper segments; because somebody got knocked off a truck and you had to go back for them; because you got cornered and made a mistake; because you forgot what to do for step 227 and had to look it up; and on and on and on. You will have to start over again, and remember, a full run takes hours and must be done in a single sitting.
And yeah, I know the tricks to make it easier. Kill all but one zombie that you kite around so the next wave doesn’t spawn, make sure everyone has a self-revive, load up with perks and armor, and so on. All of that adds interesting depth. But if you screw up and you all die, it doesn’t matter how good that run was because, aside from whatever account progression you earned during it, it all gets wiped away when you fail. After a ton of attempts, I understand why some folks just throw up their hands and spend their limited time on this Earth doing something else.
Again, this doesn’t personally bother me; failure is part of the gig, and I fully intend to finish this year’s Zombies mode at some point in the next few weeks. But it did break up a group that has a long history of doing this, and I get why they were demoralized. After our best run, where we got really close to the end before someone screwed up and it all came crashing down, one of our best guys just refused to play anymore. "I already have a job and it's really stressful," he told me afterwards. "The last thing I need is to come home and have to deal with this nonsense." I wonder how many people are going to try Ashes of the Damned and come to a similar conclusion.
That sentiment feels like an indictment of this year’s Zombies to me. It is so big and so long and so unforgiving that a lot of people simply won’t be able to complete it naturally even if they do know all the steps because they’ll either have bad teammates or get unlucky or just get discouraged after failing several times and give up. It also feels more than a little pay-to-win with the Gobblegum situation, and with how much simply grinding levels improves your chances because you have better stuff. If all you want to do is play Zombies, both of those things drag the experience down. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be a challenge, but it probably shouldn’t have people comparing it to their job, either. I fear the good folks behind this year’s Zombies mode have gotten so lost in the sauce that attempting to please the hardcore Zombies community may have come at the cost of letting regular people complete the map.
Honestly, the biggest problem we ran into on most runs was other people. We had teammates that didn’t speak English (I don’t hold that against them at all, it just makes communication difficult), teammates that ran off and left the rest of us to die, teammates that barely contributed or didn't collaborate at all, and so on. In fact, basically every good run we had early on was derailed by our matchmade fourth player; we normally roll with a full squad of four, but not everyone was available to play every night. I cannot imagine trying to do this with an entirely matchmade group. Eventually, I just turned off auto-fill and we ran a group of three when our fourth couldn’t make it, which was better than adding another random player to the mix.
]]>When I fired up Cricket 26 for the first time and hopped into a quick five-over game to get my eye in, I was pleasantly surprised by how substantially smoother it all seemed in contrast with the messy launch state of 2023’s Cricket 24. Cricket 26’s lighting and player models all really pop, the inputs feel far snappier, and the fielders all seem like they actually know there’s a game being played – unlike the dawdling doofuses in Cricket 24 who all seemed to stand around with their hands in their pockets. Then my match between the Mumbai Indians and the Delhi Capitals crashed at the change of innings. At which point I reloaded it, and it crashed again. And again. In fact, the longer I played Cricket 26, the more obvious its numerous technical flaws became, to the point that I’d have to say that my experience with Big Ant Studios’ latest has been a bit like playing on a cricket pitch in Perth – the grass looks greener on day one, but it’s not too long before the cracks start to show.
Still, there’s no question that when it works, Cricket 26 presents a much more enjoyable representation of the sport than Cricket 24 was ever capable of. Batting, in particular, feels far more responsive and natural – whether you’re using the arcade-style button controls or the more intuitive dual-stick setup. For the first time in a long time with this series, I feel like I’m able to consistently direct my strokes where I actually intend them to go, unlike Cricket 24 which often felt a bit predetermined in the way I’d keep knocking off-drives straight to the same cover fielder no matter where I aimed or how well I timed it.
That’s not to say that scoring runs has become too easy, however, and I’ve found myself playing down the wrong line and getting beaten on the inside and outside edges of the bat, which also feels far more true to life. Even on the default difficulty setting, batting in Cricket 26 has provided an absorbing challenge for the most part. I’m yet to feel the need to dig deep into the menus to painstakingly fiddle with the various timing and physics sliders in an effort to make it feel more realistic like I did with Cricket 24, which takes a lot of the trial and error out of the experience.
Bowling, on the other hand, hasn’t changed quite as much but it still feels engaging. I had hoped that the wobble seam delivery would have been added to Cricket 26, especially given that it’s become such a common variation these days that Pat Cummins has basically made it his stock ball, but sadly that’s not the case here – and the floaty knuckleball that a number of Indian pacers have added to their arsenals over the past decade or so hasn’t been included either. However, while the delivery types themselves remain the same, there has been some added nuance introduced in the form of the effect of wind on the ball. An arrow on the edge of the pitch map indicates the direction and strength that a gale is blowing, and that can be used to enhance the amount of swing on a delivery (or if you’re batting, how much further a lofted shot will travel should you aim it downwind). It’s a thoughtful addition that brings some extra strategy to each ball you face or deliver.
There’s clearly been a lot of work put into player animations too, especially as far as unique bowling actions are concerned. It’s great to see Nathan Lyon’s signature right-handed flick to the side as he leaves the top of his mark, or Mitchell Santner’s shark fin-like front hand carving through the air above his head as he’s about to release the ball. Some of these unique bowling actions aren’t just for show, either – I’ve found facing Jofra Archer to be noticeably more awkward than other fast bowlers, not just because of his speed on the ball but also the way he seems to lumber in so casually before suddenly exploding through the crease. It’s kept me more conscious of making subtle adjustments to my shot timing as the opposing team rotates from one bowler to the next.
Elsewhere, fielding has been substantially overhauled, although certain frustrating quirks still remain. There’s now much less of a delay between a fielder gathering the ball and making a return throw, and there are some new catching animations that see them diving and sliding around in a more agile fashion than they ever did in Cricket 24. However, the slow-motion runout system almost always makes me throw to the opposite end that I intended, and wicketkeeper behaviour is erratic. One moment they’re stubbornly refusing to swipe the bails off during a genuine stumping chance, the next they’re taking a superhuman catch around their ankles down the leg side. Yet, by and large, Cricket 26’s fielders display a level of alertness that more closely resembles the real thing, and it’s nice to see them run in pairs for relay throws or dive towards the rope for a tap-back.
Given that it’s been branded as ‘the official game of the Ashes’, you’d think that Cricket 26’s special mode dedicated to the freshly reignited Australia-England rivalry would have been given extra attention from the developers to ensure that it really capitalised on what has been one of the most hyped test series in recent memory. However, there appears to have been about as much thought and effort put into it as England’s approach to batting on day two of the recent first Ashes test. Sure, you do get to play all five test matches in the series in all of the relevant Aussie venues, including a day-night pink ball test at the Gabba, but there really is little else here to distinguish the mode from just building a series yourself using the tour creator that returns from Cricket 24.
There are no practice matches to play for the touring side, although given English coach Brendon McCullum’s ‘it will be alright on the night’ philosophy for player preparation, perhaps that’s true to life. Instead, the build up to each of the five matches in the series goes like this: you press a button to travel to the city hosting the match, complete a fairly modest and non-tailorable training minigame that involves bowling precisely three deliveries and a handful of batting strokes, select your final 11 from your squad of 16, mindlessly spam your way through painfully generic answers in a press conference, and then play the match itself. Repeat that four more times and you’re done.
There is a team confidence meter to maintain, and optional match objectives to complete as well, but it all feels a bit nebulous. Team confidence fluctuates depending on match results, success or failure in the training minigames, and your responses to press conference questions, but it’s all applied so inconsistently and absolutely none of it seems to have a measurable effect on anything. I failed my first training session and my team confidence took a dive, meaning I went into the opening test at Perth with my Australian team seemingly flagging at 55% confidence. It clearly didn’t make much of a difference, though, since I still ended up smashing England inside three days.
The pre-match press conferences are particularly hard to engage with, given that the questions you have to field are often factually incorrect. I kept getting asked about how I felt about securing a draw in a previous match, even though I’d won it, or I’d be asked to reflect on my performance at a certain venue even though I hadn’t played there yet. It feels less like facing a press room full of proper sports journalists and more like being punked by a crowd of teenage TikTok pranksters.
Successfully completing optional match objectives also gives team confidence a boost, but these goals seem to veer wildly from the realistic to the ridiculous. In one match I was tasked with scoring 64 combined runs with the tail, which was tricky but ultimately attainable, while in another my objective was to bat at above eight runs an over, which is an insane demand for a test match innings. You could field a team of 11 Harry Brooks and still struggle to score at that rate. You couldn’t field a team of 11 Brendan Doggetts, though, or even a single Brendan Doggett for that matter, given that he’s disappointingly absent from Australia’s Ashes squad in Cricket 26 despite making his international debut last week.
So the Ashes mode is more slapdash than fierce clash, and Cricket 26’s only other new mode of note, the management career, is equally as half-baked. To be honest, I’m typically not one to dabble in the front office side of sports simulations, so perhaps I’m not best equipped to evaluate this series’ first crack at allowing players to run a cricket club. However, after investing several hours into this fairly superficial squad management sim let’s just say I’m unlikely to become a convert any time soon.
There’s just not an enormous amount to it. You don’t get to manage the budget for player salaries, or hire a coaching staff, for example. You basically just pick your team and either play the matches or simulate them, not unlike the existing player career mode minus the training minigames and net sessions in between. It also seems a shame that there’s no option to watch a generated highlights package when you simulate the result like you can in the Football Manager series. Unless you want to be fully hands-on with each match, your only exposure to the team’s performance is via static scorecards and text-based match reports that pop up in your email inbox, which feels pretty dry.
If you do opt to play the games yourself, there doesn’t appear to be any management options during a match that make it feel any different to the general gameplay featured elsewhere. You can’t, say, run tactical team instructions out to the middle with the 12th man during a drinks break, or send a substitute fielder on because your ageing opening batsman injured his back playing a golf tournament the day before the game. Strangely enough it also doesn’t seem to factor in the unavailability of players with national team duties either. I was able to steer the NSW Blues to the top of the Sheffield Shield, largely because the likes of Australian test team stars Steve Smith, Pat Cummins, and Mitchell Starc were inexplicably available to be picked for every match of the domestic summer.
Cricket 26’s management career just feels underdone and, in some aspects, partially broken. You can adjust training schedules for each of your players, like assigning them recovery sessions to reduce fatigue or team bonding sessions to boost their individual morale meters. However, I struggled to really get a feel for the impact of these options given that the training section of the management menu often just completely failed to load. I also encountered a bug that would cause Cricket 26 to crash everytime I tried to finalise my line-up. The irony that the design of Cricket 26’s dedicated management mode appears to have been somewhat mismanaged certainly isn’t lost on me.
Elsewhere, Cricket 26 possesses most of the same feature set as Cricket 24, from the largely unaltered player career mode to the microtransaction-riddled card collecting of Pro Team – with the latter featuring a new mode called Centurian. At the time of writing this just has a ‘Coming Soon’ message posted on it, leaving me completely in the dark as to what it might actually entail. The robust suite of customisation tools for everything from players to bats to stadia remain present and useful, while the actual number of licensed teams stays more or less the same. On the upside, all but one of the 10 IPL teams are now officially included, but on the downside you still need to rely on the talents of community creators to import Indian and South African squads into Cricket 26, and New Zealand’s Dream11 Super Smash competition has seemingly been ditched entirely.
In every area in which Cricket 26 excels, though, the shine is regularly taken off it as though it’s been polished with a piece of 60 grit sandpaper pinched from David Warner’s kit bag. It feels exhilarating to setup a batsmen by pushing a few straight balls across him before pulling the trigger on a hooping in-swinger than cannons into his pads, but it’s infuriating to slave away in search of a wicket only to watch a thick edge sail into the keeper’s gloves and have it given not out for no clear reason, with no option to challenge the umpire’s decision (at one point, this happened to me three times in the space of one over). It’s satisfying to swivel-pull a short ball into the crowd for six, but absolutely deflating to hook it down to deep backward square and get caught on the boundary, only to watch the fielder very clearly step on the rope, and still be given out anyway.
I like that matches can now be affected by rain and outcomes can be decided by the Duckworth-Lewis method, but so far my only exposure to it came when I was a mere three overs into the first innings of a T20. Without warning, the game was abruptly called off due to rain and my team was declared the winner – even though I was the only one who’d had a chance to bat. This is not to mention the regular crashes I’ve experienced during the 20 hours or so I’ve invested into Cricket 26 on the PlayStation 5 so far, or the many UI glitches – like the scoreboard for The Hundred that seems to be a placeholder hastily cobbled together in MS Paint. Or the many unrealistic AI behaviours, like bowling a bunch of short stuff in the opening over of a test – or indeed opening the bowling with one of its batsmen.
Meanwhile, and as has long since become customary with Big Ant’s cricket games, the in-game commentary is about as accurate as often as a broken wristwatch. I welcome the presence of cricket luminaries like David Gower and Adam Gilchrist to bring their insights to the game, but not when it seems like they’ve been blindfolded and spun around in a circle before they entered the commentary box like they’re playing a verbal game of pin the tail on the donkey.
In spite of these issues, I find myself far more invested in Cricket 26’s future because the core experience out in the field is such a major step up from the previous game that I’m willing to live with the noticeable rough edges. Assuming that Big Ant can stamp out most of the bugs, this could yet turn out to be one of the best cricket simulations the Aussie developer has ever produced. Yet even though the developer does have a track record of providing plenty of post-release support to its cricket games – and there have already been four patches for the PlayStation 5 version in the first week since launch – it’s hard at this point to be confident that it will rectify all of my complaints. As if to justify my slight pessimism, I fired up Cricket 24 this week to compare it side by side with Cricket 26, only to discover that Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett’s facial textures had disappeared completely. I know the English batting order has a tendency to lose their heads, but this is ridiculous – and then my test match crashed before I could even bowl a ball. To be clear, that’s after more than two years of post-launch patching.
]]>Note: This review specifically covers the Multiplayer modes in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. For our thoughts on the other modes, see our Zombies review or our campaign review .
It's autumn, 2025, and I have played enough of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 multiplayer to settle into my annual camo grind. I have prestiged, both in character level and my assault rifle, and after about 20 hours I feel confident declaring that the multiplayer portion of Black Ops 7 is great. I've had an absolute blast thanks to solid maps, the awesome updated omnimove system, and the choice to play either skill-based or traditional matches. It’s not without flaws: mid-match leavers have been a real problem in the default matchmaking, and while all the guns feel really good, none of them are standout stars – but the things I like, and some parts I downright love, far outweigh the things I don't this year.
Since skill-based matchmaking is the most contentious subject around this year's Call of Duty, I'm going to address it right here at the start. I believe swapping out SBMM as the default setting is great... and also it sucks. It's a real Schroedinger's CoD situation here. The biggest win for everyone, however, is the fact that you have a choice. Treyarch could have only done it one way or the other, but it gave us both, and the freedom to switch between these modes whenever you want is fantastic – especially because I often found traditional, non-SBMM to be a very humbling, and sometimes even frustrating, experience as a CoD player of medium skill.
First, a little background for those unaware: SBMM has been the default matchmaking mode for a while now, and very vocal portion of the CoD faithful hate it. When you'd queue up in a lobby for a multiplayer match, some Activision supercomputer somewhere would run the numbers and match you up with people of roughly the same level of skill. The criticism of this system is that you don’t really know whether or not you are good or bad, because SBMM made it so players never had to face too great a challenge. If you dominated for a few matches, you just got moved up to another lobby to match your skill, and lobbies weren't persistent. Same thing if you stunk up the joint, you'd drop down, but there was no real way to tell where in the power ladder you were at any given time.
So, this year, Treyarch made lobbies where "skill is minimally considered" be the default, but kept the option open to still play SBMM in the matchmaking menu (though it's not really apparent unless you know what to look for). Again, I really like that they give you the option for either, but I do wish the distinction was made a little more obvious, because the difference in terms of play experience is substantial. My gut tells me the vast majority of CoD players don't even know about this change, and there are surely a lot of non-competitive people wondering why in the hell they suck all of a sudden this year.
I've been playing both modes but using the default non-SBMM lobbies the majority of the time, and let me tell you: you don't know what the hell you're in for when you first enter a new match. You might find yourself in a lobby of complete boneheads who you can easily dominate for the win. I found this situation to be a frequent enough occurrence to be noticeable, but not a majority one. No, most of the time, I'd seem to load into a lobby with the god-tier Call of Duty players who this matchmaking change had in mind. And when that happens, it tends to not be very fun.
There is something to be said about playing against people above your skill level if you want to get better. Michael Jordan didn't get so good at basketball by only practicing against a high school team. But on the flipside, I am the high school basketball player, and now I'm loading into a lobby with the 1996 Chicago Bulls.
It's quite hard to learn what you’re doing wrong when you're facing people with skill levels that completely dwarf your own. By the time my reflexes register an opponent, I'm already dead. Don't get me wrong: I love being able to witness this level of play. It's super human. Sometimes I'll watch a replay of my own defeat just to be amazed by how good the other player is. In some instances, getting completely smoked has opened my eyes to what's possible and given me something to aspire to. But all that promise of self-improvement is short lived, because after a match or two of coming in dead last, I'm ready to find a new lobby.
And I know I'm not the only one – I at least finish matches like that, but others aren’t usually so courteous. In one extreme case, my team had multiple players of exceptional skill, one of whom had the Nuke calling card. You can't get that calling card without scoring 30 uninterrupted kills in a single match. You gotta be real good, and this person was truly incredible. So, rather than get shot down over and over again, the other team just quit. By the end of the match, it was six versus one, which turned an exciting win into a huge letdown, with the latter half of the match spent running around the map trying to find the one brave hanger-on.
Even when the imbalance isn’t quite that drastic, I see at least one or two people drop out frequently in the default lobbies. Some of those are going to be people who went AFK or lost their connection, sure. Maybe that's the case more often than I am assuming, but it sure does feel like other players are getting frustrated faster and more consistently than when SBMM was the norm, especially when it happens to five out of the six members of the opposing team – something I’ve never seen occur in a CoD before this one.
Does this mean I think including non-SBMM is a mistake? No, but only because you can still go back to the old style. The best part of the change is we can finally see what it’s like after years of debate, but better still, there's a choice between the two systems. I don't think having non-SBMM as the default has proven to be the right move, and I hope Treyarch decides to flip it back at some point in a post-launch patch. But at least the option means everyone can be happy. (Just kidding! This is Call of Duty, there's going to be unhappy people no matter what.)
One of the side benefits to this new system is that once you get your ass kicked a few dozen times and go back to the SBMM lobbies, you will feel like a god for the first few matches. The persistent lobbies carry through on both modes, so you can stick with the same group or back out to find a new lobby. It's actually super easy to swap around, which is a real time saver if you're burning a 2XP token.
Black Ops 7 is the first CoD I can think of where I haven't gravitated toward a single dominant weapon for my playstyle. Last year it was the XM4 assault rifle. It just felt good from level one on up, and by the time I had all the attachments, it cemented itself as my go-to option. In the years before that, I gravitated towards SMG and even marksman rifles (I'm weird but I love the Kar98 in Modern Warfare). This year, none of the guns are really jumping out at me, nor giving me that past feeling of "oh yeah, this is the one I'm going to grind first." But that’s more a testament to how they generally feel really good across the board more than anything else..
One surprise for me, though, is the MK.78 LMG. I've always enjoyed the LMGs, but this one is ridiculous. I can score kills from halfway across a map like Retrieval with ease. The only real weakness is in those tight interior sections of a map, which is to be expected given its slow aim-down-sight speed, but even then I find myself getting the jump on people more often than not. It isn't until they're almost in melee range that it fails me. It's my favorite gun at the moment, and I expect some manner of nerf in the future honestly, as it feels a little too easy to use right now.
I feel the same way about the M8A1 marksman rifle, a burst-fire gun that I also really like and sometimes seems a little too accurate. A well-aimed three-round burst can usually dispatch an opponent with ease no matter where you are on a map. The same holds true for the Shadow SK sniper rifle. If you've read any of my past reviews, you know I hate sniper rifles and the people who use them – but, for whatever reason, I'm actually pretty capable with the Shadow SK. Sniper is a class of weapon I've historically only really played to satisfy some daily challenge or on the camo grind, but this year I find it to be well within my capabilities as a CoD player. I dropped on iron sights as an attachment and ended up getting Play of the Game at one point. It's fun and I'm good at it, which makes me naturally assume there's something wrong with it.
While even the best weapons don't really stand out to me like in years past, the notable exception are the SMGs, but they stand out because they feel bad. It's usually one of my favorite weapon classes, but this time none of them have felt like anything I want to use long-term. Traditionally they've always excelled at close-to-medium range, but this year's don't seem to work at anything but super-close range. I'm going to have to revisit them, but of all the unlockable SMGs, I didn't find a single one I’d consider for a daily driver. I'm hoping when I get deep into my camo grinds I'll find some combination that feels right, but for now, they're very uninspired.
Here's the thing about Call of Duty: the guns are always good. They figured this formula out a long time ago, which makes it hard to significantly improve on them. This year is no exception. With the exception of the SMGs, this relative equality of quality across the board is one of the more impressive parts of this series, even if it means there are no true stars this year. It's a ultimately good problem to have. "Oh no, I like almost all of these guns, boo hoo to me, they're nearly all fun and good."
Omnimovement is a relatively new addition to CoD, one that I liked last year but found generally favored controller players. The best thing about the addition of omnimovement, however, was the ability to functionally move and aim while prone. It's a very legit strategy in multiplayer to fling yourself backwards into a corner and reduce your target footprint while maintaining full aim. Before omnimovement, you'd lay prone and were extremely limited in how and where you could aim. All the cool stuff from Black Ops 6 is still here, and I do think for the most part it helps controller players more than mouse and keyboard nerds like myself, but that doesn’t mean I’d trade it away.
What's new for Black Ops 7 is the ability to wall run and wall jump, and that changes everything in the best possible way. When you come around a corner, you best be keeping an eye on the sky, because the move now is for people to try and get the jump on one another, literally. It's a whole new axis you need to be aware of, and it seems like it should be overwhelming to try and keep track of, but it's not. It's actually awesome, especially when the situation is flipped and you fly out from behind a wall and dispatch an opponent before you even hit the ground.
You can bounce up to three times, and there are precious few places where this can be consistently maxed out, but in Cortex I got smoked by someone who made full use of that to bounce back and forth between the giant sci-fi holding tanks. I even watched him do it in awe, something that no doubt cost me the L – but hey man, respect where respect is due.
The maps are purposefully designed with this new system in mind, and Blackheart and Imprint in particular have spots where CoD is practically begging you to wall run and jump. It doesn't feel tacked on or unnecessary, either. It feels as natural as any other movement on any other map in any other CoD. It's just done so well, and in some ways legitimizes traditional bunny-hopping. Now, instead of spamming jump like an idiot, you can parkour off the walls to both avoid getting hit and nail that perfect trick shot of your own.
What I find technically impressive is I've yet to encounter any glitches or exploits to the improved omnimovement system. It seems like letting players bounce 30 feet in the air would expose some cracks in the geometry, but so far, so good. It does feel a little weird when you jump higher than the top of a structure but an invisible wall keeps you from landing on it. I would like it if there were more areas only accessible with smartly timed jumps. Right now, there's a floating shipping container in Exposure that requires good timing to reach, but that's about the only one that springs to mind. And getting to it is so fun: timing your jumps with the sway of the container. Give us more hard-to-reach places, please!
Skirmish, the 20v20 mode, is new this year – but outside of the purposes of this review, I don't think I'll play it again. It's just not fun. The maps are too small for Warzone-type play, but too big for the normal objective-based play. It's pure chaos, but not in a way I enjoy.
Since you respawn from the air in a wingsuit, you're a prime target to get shot out of the sky and go right back into a 10-second cooldown to spawn again. On the flip side, if a sniper has you pinned down, you can just respawn and fly toward wherever they are sitting to take them out. Either way, I can't figure out a strategic approach to Skirmish that’s any fun, which is something I value greatly in my multiplayer modes. The quick turnover rate means you don't get the opportunity to flank an entrenched player or team, or really make any strategic moves at all other than land, shoot, die, repeat.
Gunfight returns this year and it's another mode I don't really care for. They're 2v2 matches where you get random guns at the start of each round, taking place on small maps, and it's not for me. Playing with a random person isn't very fun, unless you end up with someone REALLY good. It just doesn't jibe with the way I want to play Call of Duty and, in my experience, whichever team gets the first win is going to be the one that wins the whole match more often than not. But I'll never advocate for fewer modes, and I know some people really enjoy Gunfight, so I’m at least glad it’s available.
Most of the more traditional multiplayer modes from last year are back as well, including Kill Confirmed, Domination, Hardpoint, Control, and Team Deathmatch, and I don’t really dislike any of them. Search & Destroy is also back, but I have not once been dropped into a map for it in regular matchmaking. In fact, I found myself dropped into Hardpoint, Kill Confirmed, and Overload way more than any of the other modes, and I’m not totally sure why that is.
Overload is new this year, and it's basically capture the flag. There's an EMP device that spawns on the map, and the goal is to pick it up and run it into the opposing team's zone to get the win. I actually really like this mode, especially on maps like Flagship. Unlike Skirmish, the chaos is fun, and doing a diving leap into the enemy team's zone when you have the EMP is an excellent feeling.
Overload is definitely my favorite objective-based mode, while Team Deathmatch and Free-for-All remain my favorite modes of all. When I'm on the grind, I'll uncheck all modes except those two, and only select them all again when I'm teaming up with friends for some generalized multiplayer chaos. Both of these modes have always been my favorites because the objective is simple: get as many kills as possible during a match to win. I'm a simple man of simple tastes. When there's only one thing to do, there's less chance your team will screw it up – especially since my occasional frustration with objective-based modes in CoD arises when people treat them like Deathmatch anyway. For example, you might have a team in Hardpoint that completely dominates the field, scoring kill after kill, but also ignores holding the Hardpoint, and you end up with a sour-tasting loss.
That's not the case in Team Deathmatch or Free-for-All. You just run around shooting people until the match is over. No pick-ups like Kill Confirmed, no holding an area like Hardpoint, no rushing the EMP device to the enemy's base like in Overload. They're my favorite modes because I can shut off my brain and focus on getting better with my weapons. And, best of all, any skill improvements made during Team Deathmatch and Free-for-All carry over to the objective-based modes.
Black Ops 7's first batch of multiplayer maps are really good. They all do an excellent job showing off the new wall run and wall jump mechanics, with some areas on the maps specifically designed to let you run and jump over pits or around corners. I don't think there's a dud in the bunch. Even the ones I didn't really care much for at first, like Scar or Homestead, I warmed up to quite a bit after a few matches.
I think my favorite maps are Retrieval and Hijacked. Retrieval is a medium-sized map with a melting glacier on one end, a frozen river on the other, and plenty of structures and different levels in between. It's where I was able to get my first "moonshot," an 86m shot with the MK.78 LMG. Apart from being a really fun map, it's also visually one of my favorites. I love the winding tunnels of sparkling ice inside the base of the glacier.
Hijacked takes place on a yacht with two lanes down either side, a middle area where they all meet, and different levels of the boat both above and below deck. It's a great map to rack up multikills, especially if you're playing against a team of less experienced players. You can post up on one of those lanes and wait for people to come around the corner in a group and just go crazy. At the same time, it's a snap to flank those positions, so you can't stay for too long unless you want to get smoked.
All of the maps are built expertly. There's no annoying sniper nest or hidey-holes in them, which means campers have a really hard time spending half the match in one little area. If you stop moving, someone's going to get you, because there's nowhere to hide that doesn't have some angle of attack. You might find a place to back into a corner, sure, but we all know to check the corners in Call of Duty. It boggles my mind to think about the know-how involved in designing maps like the ones here, with a level of expertise that brings the quality of all the maps to a consistently high standard. None of them rise too high above the pack but, just like with the guns, that’s not a terrible problem to have when I’m having such a good time with all of them.
]]>As a fighting game fan, I’ve grown to enjoy the process. Spending extended amounts of time in training mode learning the timing of memorized button presses in the hopes that, when it really counts, that practice will pay off. This might be why I found Forestrike, a 2D martial arts inspired roguelite that lets you plan out your approach to solving a gauntlet of combat encounters before executing upon them for real, so uniquely appealing. It successfully evokes the feeling of classic kung fu fight choreography by mixing straight up hand-to-hand combat with clever moments of using the environment to your advantage, or turning an enemy’s own weapon against them, or causing friendly fire simply with an effortless step to the side, all on a 2D plane with minimalist spite art. The precision and memorization needed to accomplish these impressive looking feats can be brutal, especially considering how easy it is for one mistake to cascade into many more, eventually cratering a run, but this clever concept still manages to pack a heck of a punch.
Forestrike puts you in control of Yu, a young martial artist who is part of the Order of the Foresight, a faction dutifully devoted to serving their Emperor, and one that becomes dedicated to the mission of saving said emperor from the manipulation of a being known as The Admiral. There’s a surprising amount of dialogue in Forestrike as we learn more about The Order and the various masters that guide Yu along his journey in between each run. In that way, it’s a lot like the intermissions between runs of Hades, but instead of always looking forward to the new things characters had to say, I generally found myself eager to get on with it so I could get back to fighting. A complete lack of voice acting certainly contributed to this, but the writing and characters themselves also just weren’t strong enough to keep my interest for very long.
Once you’re in an actual run, Forestrike flexes its muscles. It’s structured like a gauntlet of combat encounters against increasingly difficult foes, but before the actual fighting starts you’re able use your foresight technique to essentially do a practice run. That lets you find the right combination of attacks, dodges, and techniques to defeat all of the enemies in the most efficient way possible. Defensive resources like blocks and dodges are extremely limited, and it’s rare that you’ll go into an encounter with more than one of either. At first it felt rather frustrating as I just continuously found myself being forced to burn my dodge or block against the first tough enemy, which meant I wouldn’t be able to avoid the attacks of the last one. Eventually, though, a visual language started to develop as I learned how enemies would react to my actions and how I could use those predictable tendencies to my advantage.
If one enemy was charging me from the right, I could use my dodge resource to move an enemy on my left to the other side, putting him right in the way of that attack. If I was up against an enemy with spikes on the front of their body, I could look for a type of puppet enemy that drops its head when killed, which could then be picked up and thrown to kill the spiked foe from a distance. Figuring out this visual language organically was super satisfying, and I felt like I was getting further and further in my runs not because my character was becoming more powerful, but because I was simply getting better, which is always a great feeling in a roguelite.
What really makes the gameplay sing are the different martial masters that you take along with you in each run, which dictate what techniques you’re able to use. There’s Talgun, who is the master of the Leaf style, which focuses primarily on redirecting enemy attacks so that your foes take each other out; Nodai of the Cold Eye style, which focuses primarily on blocking, restoring health, and brute force; and my favorite, Monkey, who utilizes a wild fighting style that relies on surprising foes with dropkicks, bananas, and resting on the floor so that enemy attacks go right over and slam into the foe behind you.
Each style requires a completely different approach to solving the puzzles of combat, and I loved jumping between them and seeing the many different techniques that unlock the further you get in a run. Each time you beat the boss of one of the four regions, you unlock more techniques that get added to the pool of randomly selected rewards, which essentially acts as the permanent progression that helps give you the extra edge you’ll need to conquer each of the four regions of the campaign.
The one big issue with this formula is that the amount of precision required in some of the later stages can get pretty out of control, especially considering how quickly things can go off the rails with just one error. I’ve had multiple combat encounters where all of my practice runs went flawlessly, but on the actual attempt I was just a hair off on the timing of a single strike, which would essentially cause my whole plan to break down and force me to improvise the rest of the way, which usually leads to either death or near death. That’s just part of the design, but it doesn’t stop it from being extremely frustrating to lose an otherwise great run to what ultimately amounts to being off by just milliseconds one time.
The sprite based art style is intentionally minimalist – much like Skeleton Crew Studio’s previous game, Olija – and for the most part is very charming. The sprites themselves are surprisingly expressive despite their lack of detail, the 2D art is fantastic, and the actual combat animations are great – but for whatever reason the same attention was not given to the walk and run animations, which are some of the most awkward I’ve seen in 2D pixel art. It’s not a huge deal since Yu only really walks and runs in between runs at the monastery, but it’s still a very strange quirk in a game that otherwise looks great.
]]>Hot off of dozens of hours reviewing the sweatiest kind of game imaginable in ARC Raiders, wading into the cozy waters of Disney Dreamlight Valley once again was like stepping into a warm bath at the end of a hard day’s work. I’ve managed to mostly keep up with this charming, Disney-infused life simulator for the past three years, which has been content with adding a handful of new areas and characters here and there rather than innovating in that time. But with its latest expansion, Wishblossom Ranch, developer Gameloft Montreal promised a massive new region to explore atop the back of various recognizable steeds that seemed like a perfect reason to return for an extended stay. It’s without question the most ambitious update yet, with some interesting mechanical tweaks, like the focus on riding and building bonds with horses to unlock new abilities – but that ambition comes at the cost of this being the most buggy version of Disney Dreamlight Valley so far. Similarly, the new map has some of the most creative and unique regions I’ve seen in any cozy game, but that’s offset by new characters that I had a hard time connecting with and the usual, completely unnecessary grind to get through its main quests. All-in-all, I’m still glad to be back in the comforting embrace of this incredibly zen game, but the admirable risks Wishblossom Ranch takes only pay off some of the time.
If you’ve yet to visit Dreamlight Valley’s colorful, cartoonish world, this is a life simulator that’s centered around reconnecting with Disney characters from your childhood and the hopeful, optimistic sense of wonder you presumably had beaten out of you in the years since. You’ll run around performing low stress activities like gardening, cooking, and fishing while hanging out with the likes of Simba from the Lion King, Elsa from Frozen, and Goofy from... well, y’know, it’s Goofy. Wishblossom Ranch is the latest made up compound word followed by a location noun to be added to the mix, and it asks you to solve a mystery surrounding a place where one’s wishes are granted that seems to have run out of magic. While hot on the case, you’ll meet a handful of new Disney characters to befriend, explore and settle the biggest regions Dreamlight Valley has seen so far, and, most importantly, unlock a roster of iconic mounts to ride around on. When all of that is working, it’s some of the best-spent hours this chill adventure has offered me yet.
As the name Wishblossom Ranch implies, the main attraction this time around are the four-legged creatures you’ll tame, each with their own special ability to help you navigate the world and solve simple puzzles. The brave and bold Maximus from Tangled will let you leap across large gaps, while the mighty and battle-tested Khan from Mulan can kick apart physical barriers, and the goofy looking Pegasus from Hercules lets you fly to the highest heights of the mountainous area. You’ll also get to customize and name your own horse (mine was called Neighthan), which has the ability to push around heavy objects with its head like a big ol’ dummy. The puzzles you’ll solve using this suite of ponies are extremely basic, mostly serving as reminders that you can and should switch between mounts instantaneously and use their unique skills to push heavy blocks onto weighted pressure plates or kick obstructions to pieces, but they do a good job at giving you a reason to toggle between each of the loyal stallions and a good reason to level up your bonds with them.
The best part of these new companions, though, is the fact that they solve one of my least favorite things about Disney Dreamlight Valley since the very beginning: how insanely slow you move. I’ve had a bone to pick with this game for many years now on how painfully sluggish it feels to move around, even when aided by fast travel from zone-to-zone, but hopping atop a mount makes travel times so much faster it’s completely resolved that issue. And since you can also train your mount to help with things like stomping on ore deposits to mine for gems or dig holes in the ground for gardening, you can do lots of activities without ever having to dismount, which is a great touch. Really the only issue is that now the old areas feel so claustrophobic and small because you can sprint across them so quickly, and they could already be fairly tough to navigate on foot. Thankfully, the new areas have been designed with mounted travel in mind and are properly expansive, and getting caught in small environments in the old regions is still a lot less annoying than spending minutes on end slowly crawling through them.
Unfortunately, the process for actually improving your relationships with each of these guys can be a bit of a slog, and represents the biggest timegate you’ll find in Wishblossom Ranch, which otherwise does a pretty good job of getting rid of annoying grinds like the one found in A Rift in Time. Every time you unlock a new mount, you’ll have to spend an increasingly long amount of time leveling up your relationship with them until you unlock their unique ability that’s needed to get through the next step in the main story, and the primary way to do that is by waiting for real-life days to go by so that you can feed, pet, and brush them for large XP boosts... or do what I did and spend hours riding around aimlessly, jumping over random objects in the world to brute-force your way through it. I’m sure it would’ve been far less annoying if I would have just played more casually over the course of a few days or weeks as is likely recommended, but I’m really not a fan of arbitrary obstacles to progression that have no point beyond padding out how long it takes to finish the story, and this one is particularly silly. I’m okay with having to earn my social links with each of these quadrupedal friends, but it shouldn’t prevent me from unlocking the next area until I do, especially if the only way to speed it up is by doing meaningless busywork.
The good news is that once I did get through the grind and proceeded to the next region, I was rewarded with some of the most interesting places that Dreamlight Valley has featured to date. For example, the Pixie Acres is a magically-infused garden area with golden honey waterfalls in the distance and waterballoon fish swimming in the rivers, while my personal favorite area, Glamour Gulch, is entirely fashion-themed, and has pincushion fruit growing on trees, flowers that are made out of needles and thread, and mushrooms on the ground that are actually little buttons. The flavor and themes of these places are easily the most clever and compelling yet, and would probably even top the list of some of my favorite locales in any cozy game. It’s especially cool when you start gardening with seeds found in these areas to grow things like a vegetable made out of silk thread or cooking recipes out of those ingredients to whip up an entree called button stew. This is exactly the type of over-the-top goofiness Dreamlight Valley really needed, as opposed to the quite grounded options in the first area where you were harvesting regular ol’ tomatoes to cook tomato soup.
On the other hand, I personally was less enthused about the new characters than the environments themselves. Snow White, Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmatians, Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and Tinker Bell are the four new besties to befriend, only one of which didn’t completely annoy me over the course of the story. Snow White’s creepy cheeriness and impossibly high-pitched voice gave me the willies, Cruella de Vil was just straight up mean to me for several hours while I was forced run errands for her when I would have rather just told her to take a hike, and Tigger’s stretch of the story is so untethered from reality that I was just confused about what the heck I was doing the whole time, like one part where I had to reunite a family of balloons with faces drawn on them for some reason. Tinker Bell was genuinely the only one who was consistently helpful while also not boring into me with unnerving, wild eyes. I think this is probably the cast of added characters I connected with the least so far, even though Cruella de Vil did make me laugh by being such an irredeemable monster (as she should be). Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure lots of folks will enjoy adding these icons to Dreamlight Valley’s already impressive roster, and you can always just bring along an existing character you prefer, but man, Snow White is just not for me.
The main thing holding Wishblossom Ranch back, however, is the fact that it’s definitely the most unstable version of Dreamlight Valley so far, and that’s coming from someone who started playing during a preview period slightly before its Early Access debut back in 2022. I encountered all sorts of issues: I phased through an elevator that broke my ability to progress until I quit to the dashboard, my horses regularly hopped inside objects in the world in a super awkward and noticeable way, menus would randomly stop responding to me until I closed them and tried again, and quite a few other bizarre problems. And of particular annoyance, the absolutely atrocious camera problems Dreamlight Valley has always suffered from are amplified by the existence of bulky horses you spend a lot of time trotting upon, whose unwieldy nature cause the camera to clip through all sorts of pieces of the environment and cause a ton of issues. I appreciate that Wishblossom Ranch takes some really neat risks to make these maps bigger and add cool horse mechanics, but that seems to have come at the cost of everything feeling really janky at launch.
At one point I even found myself locked out of a critical quest line that would have resulted in me not being able to see the ending were it not for a developer-provided debug option that let me skip past the blockage. Were it not for the fact that I was working on this review, my journey would have come to a disappointing end right there. There were a few moments during the course of my adventure where it felt like I was walking on eggshells around the expansion’s bugs, and if I did a part of a quest too early or too late, I’d hold my breath hoping it wouldn’t result in a catastrophic error like the one I ultimately fell prey to. The devs at least know about this particular bug now, so hopefully they can fix it at some point, but I would recommend waiting for a round of polish or two before diving in yourself.
]]>We’ve seen stories built around redemption arcs plenty of times before, and if I’m being honest, I’m a total sucker for them. A sarcastic baddie who, despite their disdain for the law, gains enough empathy to save the day – what’s not to like? After eight episodes full of cliffhangers, surprising plot twists, and patience-testing puzzles, Dispatch has finished its own rumination on the topic, allowing me to take a more active role in determining who amongst its strong cast of charming superheroes deserves a second chance. It’s fitting, then, that developer AdHoc Studio has similarly revived a style of video game I worried was fading into the background, confidently injecting the interactive narrative genre with exciting new life.
Dispatch takes place in a captivating bizarro Los Angeles where superpowered beings, aliens, demons, and all manner of extraordinary humanoids coexist with regular people. As you can imagine, not every gifted being is benevolent, and many choose (or are forced into) a life of villainy. To help manage the onslaught of supers roaming the streets, an organisation called the SDN has stepped in, launching an insurance-type racket that allows citizens to pay for the privilege of a powerful watchdog. One of the aforementioned good guys is our discerning protagonist, Robert Robertson — otherwise known as Mecha Man — whose heroic aspirations are dashed when a rogue explosive renders his suit useless, leaving him to take on the role of a call centre worker at a small branch of the SDN.
That’s not all, though, as due to his lack of tenure, Robert is tasked with managing a group of barely reformed villains, lovingly called the Z-team, whose snarky attitudes and violent tendencies leave a lot to be desired. Across Dispatch’s approximately eight-hour runtime, it’s compelling to watch Robert grow in the wake of this sudden downgrade, experiencing the peaks and valleys of shift work. I found myself invested from start to finish thanks to Dispatch’s grounded, witty writing and the heartfelt performances delivered by its sizable cast.
Your time with Dispatch is split into two distinct parts: most of the time, you’ll be chatting through beautifully animated cutscenes, picking between amusing dialogue options and completing quick-time events like those seen in The Wolf Among Us or the Life is Strange series. Certain decisions trigger a heart-pounding ‘X Person remembered that’ notification at the top of the screen, which feels like a refreshing jolt of nostalgia in 2025. Not every decision is as impactful as you might expect, and more often than not, my choices led to unique jokes or funny animations rather than game-shifting consequences. Crucially, though, when the credits finally rolled — avoiding any spoilers — the ending I received still felt true to my version of Robert. It says something that I’m keen to jump in again, to see how the other narrative branches pan out.
The rest of your time is spent working at the SDN as a Dispatcher, assigning superheroes to a variety of jobs. Using your mouse and your wits, you’ll monitor a city map where hazard notifications periodically pop up with a timer, alerting you to various jobs the SDN needs to handle efficiently. Each hero under your command has a stat matrix, similar to that seen in Pokémon. You’ll receive a verbal description as a job appears, with your own task being to match your best hero, or in some cases heroes, based on their stats and personalities. You'll be told very soon after whether you’ve passed or failed, with success earning you experience points that lead to a permanent stat boost for each hero. Failure, on the other hand, can lead to your heroes getting hurt or, worse, being taken out of commission for the shift. Managing their individual skill sets as multiple clocks tick down in front of you is a surprisingly stressful task that compelled me to lock in.
On top of stat boosts, the Z-team can also earn special skills that impact how efficiently you operate. The superstar-turned-superhero Prism can use her powers of duplication to extend the timer on jobs, carving out precious moments to find a resolution. Elsewhere, Invisigal can utilize her lone wolf status to increase her speed if sent solo. All these moving parts compound over time and meld together well, creating a satisfying feedback loop that complements the complexity of the surrounding story without overwhelming you.
Aspects like team morale, along with how you impact poignant story beats, shape how effectively the Z-Team will perform, too. During one shift early in the series, the heroes are fighting against one another, hoping to avoid being cut from the team. This argumentative overtone bled into the dispatching minigame, with each member acting on their own accord rather than on my explicit orders.While I was frustrated by this at first, hoping to overcome the challenge with my wits, these moments of disobedience did well to integrate the interactive segments into the overarching story, with AdHoc effectively conveying Robert's irritability by ensuring you feel it firsthand. It’s one thing to write an emotive character for me to play as, it’s another to actually make me want to quit a job I don’t really have in the exact way they do.
A secondary hacking minigame is also part of your day-to-day activities, as Robert flexes the only superpower he has left: his mind. Here, you’ll roll a 3D object through a cybernetic maze as the clock ticks down, using directional inputs to forge a path towards the end goal. On top of the clock, you’ll also need to evade undulating anti-virus orbs and transfer power sources between light blocks to unlock new paths. It can be overwhelming at times as the difficulty scales over the course of Dispatch’s eight episodes, and muscling through these puzzles sticks out as some of the least compelling moments in a game that is otherwise full of them, which is a shame.
Still, despite all the roadblocks I faced at the hands of the Z-Team, I found myself defending them at every point, like a parent going to bat for their misbehaving children. The concept of ethically murky superhumans has been explored across film and TV before, but Dispatch often subverts expectations through a steady mix of dark humor and sincere interactions that kept me on my toes.
For example, while celebrating a win at one point, Robert and his team visit a villain bar, but the Thing-like Golem is forced to sit outside due to their humongous size. At this point, I’d taken quite a dislike to them and their attitude, and yet watching them slumped on the gutter with their earbuds in made them appear more human than rock monster. Just like that, a switch had flipped inside my head, and I was putty in the palm of AdHoc’s hands.
What makes Dispatch’s redemption story so effective is how it portrays its villains as emotionally complicated souls who may have lost their way rather than one-dimensional brutes. This empathetic lens makes it enticing to peel back the layers of the group, no matter how horrible they’re being or how petulant they seem. That’s not to say every character is worth forgiving, but instead, if you’re willing to make a risky dialogue choice, you may be rewarded with precious lore that could sway how you react in future situations, or what kind of ending you will receive.
All this drama is delivered through incredible vocal performances that bring Dispatch’s most profound moments to life with finesse, from the main cast of heroes to the background characters as well. Laura Bailey’s Invisigal masterfully dances between bratty and sincere, often encouraging me to break the rules with her flirty, if not threatening, style. Erin Yvette, on the other hand, subtly switches between Blonde Blazers' heroic prose and dorky banter with sharp precision. Notably, Aaron Paul’s Robert is more than just Hollywood stunt casting – he’s a standout here, delivering a nuanced performance as a man struggling to hold onto his optimism while reconciling with who he is outside of his giant mech suit.
]]>Note: This review specifically covers the Campaign mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. For our thoughts on the other modes, see our Zombies review or our multiplayer review .
Bucking the usual trend of breaks between numbered sequels, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is following just 12 months on from Black Ops 6, and you’d perhaps assume that meant only small tweaks to what was one of the series’ high points last year. But the teams at Raven and Treyarch evidently don’t see it that way, and have instead built one of the most unconventional CoD campaigns to date. In many ways, it doesn’t even feel like a CoD single-player mode. It’s more like a multiplayer experiment squeezed into a campaign shell, playing best when you’re accompanied by squadmates, echoing Zombies or the now-defunct DMZ at times. I recently criticised Battlefield 6’s single-player for playing it safe and not taking any risks, and to Black Ops 7’s credit, the same can’t be said here. The problem, however, is that not many of its big swings hit, resulting in one of Call of Duty’s most intriguing, yet flawed campaigns.
Its varied string of missions walks the tightrope between traditional military shooter and schlocky sci-fi nonsense, darting between worlds beyond our technological fingertips and deep within our most haunted of dreams. That spectacle is supported by sharp gunplay and a whole host of gadgetry and abilities that make moving around those worlds incredibly satisfying. But it all culminates in a brand-new endgame portion that stitches together aspects of CoD’s past open-world successes and failures in an attempt to become something new. In reality, that post-credits content is a repetitive shooting gallery that adds little to the excitement that leads up to it.
Much of Black Ops 7’s intrigue emanates from one fundamental design choice: for the first time in many years, a Call of Duty campaign is fully playable in four-player co-op, and it really does feel like it has been made with that in mind as the preferred method of play. This comes with both positives and negatives. Teaming up with friends is good fun, with fighting big bosses that have multiple weak points to fire upon simultaneously or stealthily working through an enemy area tactically, both coming with a good deal of satisfaction. But it also detrimentally affects the solo experience, from not having AI companions fill in for you if no buddies are online, or kicking you for inactivity if you’re idle for too long, to not even being able to pause due to its online-only nature. Its open areas and endgame portion seem catered toward a group experience as well, and can end up just a little lonely when zipping around by yourself. To an extent, it feels like Activision is finally admitting that most people come to its hallmark shooter for multiplayer fun, rather than the single-player story modes the series was founded on.
In fact, having played several missions in both co-op and single-player, I can confirm that playing solo is borderline tedious due to having to repeat multiple objectives, such as placing C4 on a building yourself four times rather than splitting them up as is intended. There are also no difficulty options this time around, meaning that, in theory, it should scale the threat depending on how many players are in your squad. In my experience, though, the number of enemies in a level remains the same, leaving me feeling overwhelmed by foes even in its earliest levels. By comparison, playing in a full squad makes these encounters a breeze, with not enough targets to go around sometimes. In fact, enemy numbers are uneven across the campaign as a whole, sometimes swarming you with dozens of rabid rushers, but at others, presenting you with a couple of soldiers wandering through a door when you’re expecting an onslaught. It’s, admittedly, a difficult balance to get right, but one that has not been achieved here.
As for the structure of the campaign, Black Ops 7’s story is delivered at breakneck speed, taking me just about five hours to reach the endgame. Its 11 missions threw me from one exotic location to the next, from one time period to another, and deep into nightmare realms full of otherworldly horrors and delights. The year is 2035, and new threats are here to instigate a global collapse once again. The re-emergence of Black Ops 2 villain Raul Menendez thrusts the playable unit, Spectre One, into action and soon has them facing off against evil tech company The Guild. What follows is a set of missions that throws you in and out of reality thanks to a fear toxin being weaponised by The Guild, led by Kiernan Shipka’s Emma Kagan, who is trading in Mad Men for mad mechs here.
A combination of cliched evil sci-fi tech corp and Batman Arkham scarecrow-esque antics leads each level to interesting places from a visual perspective, as long-buried memories of our protagonists are dredged up and morphed into horror-filled mazes. It makes for a more varied campaign when it comes to art design, with an impressive number of locations and creatures thematically filling them to gun down. I do wish there was a little more in terms of mission variety when it comes to actual level and objective design, though, with corridor shooting taking the lead in most of these excursions. There’s nothing to rival the creeping intrigue of last year’s Emergence conceptually and its branching objectives and playful enemy design, for example, nor the spy-like cool of infiltrating an embassy fundraiser or high-roller casino.
If last year’s Black Ops 6 leaned more into grounded espionage and subterfuge, 7 is a much louder proposition, choosing to demolish the lobby of a complex to gain access to it rather than sweet-talking the security guard standing in front of it. As a result, there is no shortage of big moments justifying its blockbuster label. Dodging giant falling machetes like you’ve stumbled into a Looney Tunes cartoon is a one-off joy, as is taking control of a lavish luxury boat and ramming into the side of a building. Moments like this feel pinched right out of Christopher Nolan’s back pocket and sit perfectly in the Call of Duty mold.
And that’s just the opening section of one of the standout missions, which takes place in Tokyo and has you dipping into its subway systems and leaping across rooftops. There’s a great sense of forward momentum to levels like these, and I’m a massive fan of them. I just wish more of the campaign were like this Japanese chapter, as I’m not so keen on the ones taking place in the more open-zone areas of the fictional French city-state of Avalon (itself a huge battle royale-sized hub), which struggle to bottle the same exciting energy. These typically have you moving across wider rural patches of its map in order to chase the next cluster of enemies to take down, and essentially serve as tutorials for its endgame. They’re a little less authored than others and fail to capture the same thrills as a result.
In fact, much of the time, it doesn’t really feel like a ‘Call of Duty’ campaign at all. Yes, it has the militaristic hallmarks, but borrows just as much from horde shooters like Left 4 Dead and its own in-house zombie modes. It makes for an uneven set of missions, some of which really don’t work for me, but with others that do manage to hit the spot when they capture some of the CoD cinematic legacy. They’re a rarity, though, and for every one of these, there is also a bizarrely dull sequence, such as the time you’re asked to play Frogger on a twisted, upside-down LA highway.
As you might expect, the gunplay is snappy and satisfying, with SMGs delightfully ripping through armoured enemies and sniper rifles really coming into their own and popping out bits of brain in some of the campaign’s open areas. Each weapon has a good weight to it and is super-responsive when pulling the trigger. It’s Call of Duty, they’ve been doing this for a long time now, and how good its guns feel shouldn’t come as a shock as you rip through enemy healthbars and armor chunks. These extra layers to their vitality do present a slightly more drawn-out cadence to gunfights, though, with a few extra bursts of the trigger needed to take down each. The firearms are supported by a fantastic selection of skills and gadgets, too, with killstreaks making their way into single-player, such as the joyously destructive war machine, allowing for quick mob clean-ups.
I’ll admit, I was initially sceptical of the near-future setting and Call of Duty’s return to tinkering with near-future tech when it comes to movement, but on the whole, the experiment is largely a success. Wall jumping can be a little clunky, but the kinetic super jump is very fun to use as a quick flanking tool, as is my favourite of the bunch, the grapple hook. Swinging up to roofs to find a better vantage point before swooping down on a wingsuit to get back up close opens up each level’s architecture in interesting ways. It may never reach that Titanfall 2 gold standard when it comes to FPS mobility, but there are flashes of it here, which is always welcome.
This desire to experiment also carries into its approach to boss design, which is by no means revolutionary when it comes to FPS campaigns, but a relatively new thing for Call of Duty. I appreciate the efforts made in order to make each have its own gimmick, even if they all ultimately come down to draining an oversized health bar while dodging projectiles. They certainly aren’t complex, but hitting the glowing weak points of a giant, bile-spewing plant in a cave of nightmares is certainly a step up from just pumping bullets into a Juggernaut for the hundredth time, especially when multiple targets are offered up at once and really make the whole co-op nature of the campaign feel worthwhile.
In fact, enemy variety is quite impressive this time around, with human, mechanical, and hallucinatory foes offering different threats that challenge you at all distances. Guild forces include a robot army, as well as traditional militia types such as the machine-gun-wielding Raider, colossal armor-plated Titan, and other NFL team-name adjacent units. Yes, most can be handled with some well-aimed assault rifle fire to the head, but there are more effective ways to deal with them if you choose to explore your arsenal.
I particularly enjoyed one incursion into a robotics lab, which equipped me with a Black Hat hacking device. I liked how it switched up the cadence of the unrelenting bullets a little, and meant I could disrupt and destroy these Terminator wannabes from cover. It even made a miniboss of this zone — an admittedly unexciting rotating turret — easier to take down. I appreciate that, in a game of such ferocious speed as this, you’re occasionally rewarded for taking a breath and using your brain to overcome objectives rather than solely relying on pure firepower.
It’s kind of a shame, then, that once the campaign’s set of linear missions is over, the endgame borrows little of this philosophy. After the main story’s credits have rolled, you’re offered a chance to experience its epilogue, which takes place in the open region of Avalon that’s teased throughout. If you played Call of Duty’s DMZ mode, then you’ll have a rough idea of what to expect here: it’s an extraction shooter, except it's not. You and up to three friends can team up and drop into this battle royale-sized map and complete the activities that litter it with eye-soreing regularity. On every street corner are Guild checkpoints or zombie-infested buildings to clear out as you progress through its difficulty-tiered regions in order to reach its final boss, located at the epicentre of the island’s toxic smog. The catch? If your squad goes down, you lose all of your progress. That progress is mainly tied to your combat rating, a number that goes up the more killing and map icon clearing you do, and it's therefore up to you to know when to call it quits on a certain run and extract from the map within a time limit.
For each level you go up, you’ll get a skill point to plug into any of two given options. These can range from armor plates automatically regenerating when you get kills to overall movement speed or rate of fire increases. The idea is to keep building up your character until you’ve reached the minimum recommended level of 55 and shut down the toxic threat sweeping across Avalon. The progression feels genuine, too, with my character resembling a super soldier at higher ranks, thanks to the sheer amount of speed I harnessed and the damage I could absorb.
In theory, I like this idea and think there are the bones of an exciting mode here — something that could capture the magic the likes of Helldivers 2 has done in recent times — but as is, it unfortunately gets a little tired a little too soon. Objectives are almost all exclusively "go to this place and clear out the enemies there," which I understand is part of the fundamentals when it comes to shooters, but I would’ve appreciated a little more variety and something that mirrored the minor puzzle-solving sections of the main campaign, or at least clever uses of the gadgetry it introduces. The enemy AI that walks Avalon’s streets is also dumb as bricks and pops out of cover freely, making each encounter a simple affair when you put enough distance between you and them.
Yes, zooming around on grapple hooks and transitioning into wing suit gliding mid-fall is still incredibly satisfying, as is plotting out methods of attack in a four-player squad, but all semblance of interesting level or mission design is traded in upon entry here for a few hours of relatively mindless shooting in order to watch some numbers tick up. In some ways, it sits somewhere between the campaign missions and Zombies in its design, but frustratingly borrows the least interesting aspects of both, neglecting the mission structure and mystery-solving that each mode thrives on. It results in a reasonably enjoyable, but not essential, second serving to the campaign. And don’t worry, if the endgame doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, or even sounds a little daunting (the ferocity of its bullet sponge hordes can get overwhelming in its latter stages, especially when heading in solo), the story does wrap up satisfyingly enough beforehand for it not to feel like you’re missing out on an ending completely.
It’s a story nowhere near as accomplished as last year’s effort, though. Effectively a direct sequel to Black Ops 2 that also ties into the events of Black Ops 6, presumed knowledge and the speed at which its setup is told can be a little disorientating, especially if you aren’t familiar with its 2012 predecessor. The themes are personal this time around, with David "Section" Mason, recast here as Heroes’ Milo Ventimiglia, placed centre stage as he battles with his past – namely the loss of his father, Alex. There are some fun revelations along the way, as well as treats for long-term fans of the Black Ops series, but as someone who has never held those characters in as high regard as their Modern Warfare counterparts, the pulling of the heartstrings didn’t quite work for me.
It also means that the rest of the Spectre One squad doesn’t really get plot points of their own aside from flashes of resurfacing trauma, relegating them very much to support characters in David’s world, as Michael Rooker’s Harper in particular is given some truly dumb lines to scream as loud as he can. That being said, if you are someone who has always preferred the adventures of Woods, Mason, Adler, and co, I’m sure you’ll have a great time here. It does mean, though, that this revisiting of the past, combined with a thick layer of exposition, can make the early hours of the story relatively impenetrable to newcomers, so I’d bear that in mind if you’re coming in fresh. I’d really recommend a thorough recap of the Black Ops timeline to all if you wish to get the most out of it.
]]>Where Winds Meet is an ambitious exercise in maximalism. It’s sprawling world is a vibrant Wuxia love letter filled with over the top characters with infectious charisma who can run up walls and practically fly through the air, grand odes to the beauty of the natural world, and the inescapable violence and dark political sorcery that threaten all of that on a daily basis. Combat is a steady, enjoyable ebb and flow that is full of style and substance, but at a slower and more tactical pace than you might think from just watching it. The collage of stories it tells, both the main saga and the innumerable smaller fables and side affairs, is a turbulent gust of ups and downs both thematically and in quality. But unfortunately, the journey to experience it all is pocked by the steep cliffs of jarring late game progression pacing and rocky valleys jagged with dizzying amounts of micromanagement that turns the very idea of interacting with its RPG systems into stone.
If you’ve seen movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Kung Fu Hustle, you’ve experienced Wuxia fiction before. It’s a genre that is heavy on operatic and exaggerated fantasy, usually featuring a young and masterless wanderer looking to find their place in a world where martial arts are akin to magic, and the strongest practitioners are superheroes who wield the elements like a weapon and practically fly. Naturally, all of this makes for the perfect building blocks of a video game, and Where Winds Meet really does nail the vibes pretty consistently, at least.
The fictional version of 10th-century China it’s set in is a politically broken place, where powerful clans fight to divvy up the region both with open warfare and subterfuge. It's the perfect backdrop for your character, an orphan raised by a working class, well-enough-to-do wine maker that's just itching to leave the humble life behind in search of adventure and purpose. The tale that sends you to lavish palaces, haunted caves, and dank dungeons is a run of the mill one with a handful of memorable moments that would be moving, but they are often undone by some pretty awful English localization that makes exchanges between characters dense with redundant sentences and turns of phrase that don't really make any sense.
It's also plagued by weird technical issues like voice lines running over one another, subtitles not matching the words coming from characters mouths, or voices going missing entirely. A dramatic last stand where two frenemies unite to beat back a great evil is completely undermined when their voices suddenly stop speaking and never kick back in. Later in chapter two, you and an ally must don disguises to sneak into a party, Honey Bee Inn-style – but even after changing, your model looks no different, which is very jarring when party guards treat you like you’re blending in. The main campaign is only two chapters but they're long. With some diversions into side quests and mini game dabbling, they took me roughly 30-40 hours to complete, and while each button up their own isolated stories well, it leaves the journey of your wanderer on a rather unsatisfying cliffhanger.
The various side stories have the same uneven quality. On the whole, the best of them are better written and have far more interesting plots than the main campaign, as well as a greater dramatic range. One story had me leading ghosts to the afterlife by helping them through the physical and emotional trauma of the violent fall of their Buddhist commune. Another starts only when you join some half-naked martial arts school trainees in what seems like a sort of hazing ritual. There's a spontaneity to these stories that you don’t really see in other RPGs like this, but they are also sullied with way more of the technical blemishes that undercut the main story.
True to its inspiration, the combat in Where Winds Meet is flashy and energetic as you’d hope. Each of the seven weapons feel distinct and dangerous, and some of these have different styles to discover that change the patterns of your normal and heavy attacks, as well as the weapon skills you can unleash on your enemies. You can equip two at a time, providing access to different kinds of offense that might give your kit some much needed flexibility – but weapon styles are classed into support, DPS, and tank types, and I found I was much better off sticking to weapon pairs that matched their distinctions since switching between them offered greater synergies. I spent almost all of my playthrough as a tank, with a spear and glaive that would actually buff each other when I used specific abilities in certain combinations. I would start with the spear to taunt my foes and raise my defense, which would turn the self-shield ability on my glaive into a powered up version that also raised its damage if I switched to it in a short window of time.
You start with a sword and get a spear and an opportunity to choose a third weapon pretty early, but it's a real pain in the ass to find anymore after that. That’s mostly because you might find a rope dart or bladed umbrella in your travels, but they’re unusable until you also learn a combat style to wield them with. I probably went a solid 10 hours before I found a style for an umbrella I had picked up, and that's without even addressing the fact that the umbrella was underleveled, and that I would now need to spend resources to level up both it and the style that used it to get them on par with the enemies around me – a task that was certainly not worth the effort just to see if I liked it or not.
All of this ability chaining and buff management made Where Winds Meet feel much more like an MMO than an action game. It’s faster paced than the genre might typically be known for, but this combat doesn’t share any of the sensibilities of a Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry. There’s no bouncing enemies or air juggles. Nary an air combo or wall splat. Just a lot of stun meter management and weaving attacks and abilities into a specific sequence to make the most out of your opportunities to do damage. I can’t speak for how other classes felt, but the tank was right at home to me as a lapsed MMO guy. Managing when to defend and when to go all out felt almost identical to a Dark Knight in Final Fantasy XIV, except with an active block, parry, and dodge.
These tools do help break up the sort of autopilot syndrome of many MMO battles. Especially the parry, which is often the vital difference maker between capitalizing on a big attack in order to creat an opening that wouldn’t come by simply moving out of the way, and getting overwhelmed by a bevy of stamina and health draining barrages instead. Parries become so important that there is even an auto-parry system you can toggle on and off that gives you regenerating resources called insight points to spend as "get out of jail free cards" when an incoming attack is about to land. This was a great system for me to play around with early on, and I still appreciate it as a clever way to blunt some of the difficulty spikes for people who need it.
The MMO-but-rowdier combat shined the most against groups of regular enemies. I’d still get to apply my beat-em-up flow chart of finding and eliminating the scariest enemy of the group – a healer, buffer, strong ranged attack, etc. – while navigating the threats of all of the lower tier henchmen, but keeping my attack loop going and buffs topped off while doing so added an extra layer of tactics that really created a flow state I don’t usually get from games like this. Of course, these enemies aren’t very diverse, largely the same types of guys in different faction garb with a special gang-specific unit to spice it up.
Ironically, I think the flaws of this amalgam is most evident against bosses, where things really just get reduced down to a rinse-repeat cycle of parrying and dodging attacks, counter attacking, avoiding big telegraphed blows, and so on. Most bosses are just super thugs with greater health and damage than the guys like them that you’ve encountered in the field. The occasional big spectacle boss can shake things up, but even that tier of baddies is hit or miss. Chinese dragon dancers in a full connected costume that hops on beams and shoots fireworks at you? Hit. A late chapter one boss that seems to be attempting to recall Sekiro’s Lady Butterfly fight from memory? Miss.
The vast open world is overflowing with things to find and do when your adventure begins. Especially early on, I was pretty regularly surprised by some of the mostly silly things I stumbled across, like a bear practicing tai chi. But, as is true with the smarter moments in Where Winds Meet, that's not simply there for a chuckle. You can actually spy on it and, through careful study (a timing minigame where you need to press a button while a ring closes), you too can learn tai chi. This, and many other so-called mystic arts, are learnable in this way and have many uses. With tai chi, I could actually channel the power of the wind to yeet this very same bear into nearby rocks. I could use it to stir up shallow bodies of water and shake wildlife onto land, or even gracefully rip a shield out of the hands of bad guys during combat. Of the many, many things Where Winds Meet tries to pull your attention to in its world, this was by far the most clever. When time permitted, I always stepped aside to try to use my mystic arts to solve puzzles or help (or harass) people in the wild.
Where Winds Meet’s big problem, though, is that it is filled wall to wall with other activities that come nowhere close to this sort of ingenuity. There are some jobs you can pick up that make a good first impression, like a healing minigame that turns curing diseases or setting broken bones into a card battler. But that doesn’t evolve much past a basic Slay The Spire-style back and forth and doesn’t really reward you meaningfully as you progress up the ranks. Most everything else are versions of the sorts of things you'll see in any open world RPG like this, from fishing to crafting to duels to scavenger hunts – none of these changed the well worn formula of these distractions in a way that made checking each one out more than a couple of times feel worth the trip.
And that’s despite the fact that they all dump a bunch of loot on you every time you succeed. Just about everything you do in this game does, but very little of what you are given is worth even opening your inventory to take a second look at. It's not that it's all worthless, chances are its going to be potions or food items that will be auto-used when necessary, or the various crafting and upgrade materials that will wait patiently deep in your pockets for when you occasionally need them. My only relationship to any of this stuff is hoping I have enough when its time to level up.
Same with gear, which I just slot in when its time to make my overall power level rise. Weapons, armor, and accessories all have little nuances to increase things like crit rate and damage by small percentages, including set bonuses if you match pairs of items with similar set symbols, but this wall of text approach to equipment management is off putting and not even very impactful until way into the endgame. Where Winds Meet somehow finds ways to take the micromanagement even further overboard, allowing you to spend resources to upgrade the gear slots themselves to provide micro bonuses, eventually letting you equip additional full sets of armor that add a small percentage to your overall power on top of everything else. I have to imagine that the amount of people who are excited to wring every single number out of this game in such a neurotic way is measurable on fingers and toes. Most people, me included, will probably just click the super handy "Quick Advance" button in the bottom corner that spends all of your resources to upgrade everything it can in a manner it deems fit, an option whose mere existence sort of makes a more damning argument against these overstuffed systems than I ever could.
There are milestones that freeze your ability to continue leveling up at certain points until you pass what's called a Breakthrough Test, pitting you against waves of enemies that you must slay in a certain time frame in order to move on. When you pass, not only does your max level rise, but so do the collective strengths of all of your enemies, which feels like it undermines the progress you’ve made in order to complete it in the first place. After the first four of these worldwide level-ups, the Breakthrough Tests start to get tough. The most I had to retry any fight in Where Winds Meet was maybe my breakthrough test to get to level seven, as I just couldn’t kill the fiery calvary boss it threw at me fast enough.
Pushback from a legitimate challenge was not really the annoying part of this ordeal, though. Its that main story quests start to become level gated as you approach the end, meaning you have no option but to spend time simply grinding experience in order to eventually pass these literal DPS checks. But even then, your Breakthrough Test might require you to wait real life hours before you can move to the next tier, as it did for me on two occasions by gating my progress behind daily server updates. Making me jump through a bunch of hoops to progress only to then tell me that I'm actually moving faster than intended is ridiculous. Don’t tell me how to waste my life!
Gliding across the windy shores, rolling hills, craggy mountains, and bustling towns of the jianghu is a breezy experience when your generous triple jump and wall running abilities actually work. But during every play session, at inexplicable intervals of time, these features would inevitably stop working entirely, only to be fixed when I log out and log back into the client. This doesn’t just make navigating all of the mixed terrain a problem, but some hidden chests or activities that require these extra movement options are temporarily taken off the table for reasons that never feel good.
Navigating menus to sort out your gear, check the map, or level up your abilities can be a chore as well. The full main menu always lags when you open it, and gets buggier every subsequent time you do. Button presses feel unresponsive on controllers, and fumbling through sub-menus to click a tool tip so I could read a further item description or find out where on the map I can find more of a thing was always a draining experience, especially when some of those links and shortcuts lead to blank screens or were just broken all together. The world of Where Winds Meet could have done with a couple dozen fewer of its random, five-minute mini-quests if it meant spending more time making the process of flipping through all of these spreadsheets less painful.
You can play a lot of Where Winds Meet co-op, but servers were pretty scarce pre-launch and finding people to run multiplayer-focused events like clearing a set playlist of Assassin’s Creed-esque outposts or big raid style bosses with multiple phases and mechanical gimmicks wasn't possible. I did at least get to take on the latter events thanks to a full CPU party that would take on the necessary roles. These automated party members were competent enough to do the Simon Says required to minimize damage when necessary, but if they weren’t basically immortal, I'm not sure they would have had the chops to kill any of these scary enemies. I'm sure my experience here is not representative of the design intention of these big co-op romps, but I'm still glad I could get access to the novel items they drop without having to find five of my own friends to do so.
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